Meet Shannon Newman, Product Owner – The PPR
As a Product Owner I work closely with all Healthcode departments to interpret our customers’ current and future needs and this informs the requirement documents I prepare for our development teams. I then coordinate with the relevant teams to ensure we achieve our targets.
The PPR (The Private Practice Register) is a project with quite an ambitious development roadmap. We are looking to our industry stakeholders for guidance on their priorities as we align The PPR with the Medical Practitioners Assurance Framework (MPAF) but in the short term we are also making improvements to the registration process to make it a better user experience for practitioners.
What skills do you need?
The ability to communicate effectively is key as my role involves building relationships with stakeholders and different teams within the company. Everyone I talk to has their own ideas about a project and it is up to me to establish a clear direction and then explain this to our programmers and developers in terms of what we want to deliver for our customers.
What did you do before?
Prior to joining Healthcode, I worked at Bupa for nearly 10 years within member services, speaking to customers on the telephone. After a short spell at another company, I became a member of Healthcode’s Customer Services Team in 2016 and after about a year I moved to a Test Analyst role in the programme team.
I think working in Customer Services was a really important steppingstone in my career path as it gave me a good insight into how our customers operate and the issues they face. That knowledge has proved so valuable in helping me to see Healthcode’s solutions in a customer context and understand issues from their perspective.
What are you excited about most?
I’m excited about the evolution of The PPR from being a tool for fast-track insurer recognition into a tool that will support information sharing and clinical governance across the independent health sector. Agreeing common data standards for the sector is a critical step in the process and to facilitate this Healthcode has established a Data Standards Group with representatives from insurers, hospitals and practitioner organisations – my team are already working on the actions agreed during the Group’s first meeting. This collaborative approach means everyone should have the opportunity to contribute and benefit from capabilities of The PPR.
What do you enjoy most about working for Healthcode?
I love the can-do culture here. There is plenty of scope for professional development and opportunities to get insights into different areas of the business which wouldn’t be as easy within a more formal corporate structure. I’ve worked on a variety of projects and found that if you want to take something on, the company will give you the backing you need to run with it, rather than tell you to ‘stay in your lane’.
I’ve been given a lot of support, professionally and personally, since I joined Healthcode which I really appreciate and I am surrounded by friendly, sociable people.
And finally, how do you switch off outside work?
My two boys are seven and ten and they take up a lot of time – we like to travel into London to visit museums among other things. Personally, I enjoy live music so we regularly go and see bands. I am also fascinated by US politics and I listen to quite a few podcasts on that subject because there is so much to understand!
