Rucha here! In this part of the Getting To Know You Series you’ll be learning a little bit about me and how I started working with this amazing team!
I grew up in the hospital industry. My dad became a CFO of a hospital by the time I was 1, my mom has been a practicing dietitian for the past 30+ years, and our family friends have either been physicians or hospital administrators as a result. Every day, I’d hear my parents and their friends talk about the separate sides of the hospital system, clinician versus administrator, and it was intriguing. It seemed amazing to me how different their points of view could be while working within the same environment. I would ask far too many questions than could be answered in dinner conversation about it, and so at age 16 I went down the path of shadowing and working in physician practices and hospitals. I studied healthcare sciences as an undergraduate student. For 7 years I didn’t think about much else. Now, at age 27, it seems it’s no fluke I decided on a career in an environment that can only feel like home by this point. For a while in between though, that wasn’t the case.
For the past few years, I’ve done a lot of baking. I love baking and consider it a true passion. By day I was baking in a professional kitchen, covered in flour and sugar, rolling out dough and filling pies and turnovers with local and fresh ingredients. At home, even after long shifts, I’d continue to bake. I couldn’t eat any of the items I was making at the bakery as I am allergic to wheat, so at home I’d start from scratch with complex flour combinations to achieve the texture and flavor of the award winning desserts I was helping to make at work. I’d sit down with a recipe, consider the ingredients and the cooking method with the intention to keep a gluten-free cake moist, a chocolate chip cookie less dense, a pie dough more flakey. If I could achieve that, I would make a lot of people who’ve been missing good dessert thanks to their wheat allergy happy. It all started with finding the appropriate cooking method and proper handling of the ingredients. I adapted long-standing recipes to make them less sugary, less densely flour-y, less of the unnecessary stuff, and started guiding others to make their own tasty gluten free desserts. I think that’s why when I stumbled upon the opportunity to return to my first focus in healthcare, I jumped on it. Managing the complex world of healthcare through consulting and education seemed like the best way to combine my new unique skillset. But more than that, I was excited to start a job providing solutions to common issues through education in the fundamentals. Just like I did with my baking at home.
The day to day activities working for AQ-C and AQ-IQ are interesting and educational, with a learning opportunity at every turn. Though I get to continue baking (to (hopefully) my coworkers delight) I also get to evaluate and help improve the relationship between the billing side and clinician side–a relationship my parents have been teaching me about my entire life. I’m excited to see where this journey will take me and the interesting people I’ll have the fortune to meet along the way.
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