Influential Women in Captive Insurance: Leena Johns

Leena Johns, Chief health & wellness officer, MAXIS Global Benefits Network

Leena Johns is chief health and wellness officer at MAXIS GBN and heads the MAXIS Health & Wellness team. The team is responsible for multinational global healthcare data analytics and workplace wellness solutions, collaborating with the firm’s local insurance partners around the world and the global employee benefits leaders at multinational clients.

Through the suite of dashboard reports created by Johns’ team, multinationals can better understand the performance of their medical plans around the world, gather trends and insights that can help them support their people’s health and address their biggest cost drivers. She created MAXIS Global Wellness, a curated marketplace of centralised digital global wellness solutions for multinational employees to address the cost drivers seen in their medical claims data.

Johns joined MAXIS in 2014. She is based in New Jersey and is a medical doctor.

How did you get started in the captive insurance industry?

I began my career as an ER physician before making the huge decision to move into global employee benefits in the mid-2000s. This transition was challenging because, as a doctor, you’re trained to prioritise your patients above all else without overtly worrying about billing and financial arrangements, whereas financial considerations are foremost in the insurance industry.

I soon discovered that insurance companies can be slow to adapt policies and coverage to meet the evolving needs of clients and that reaching a consensus on changes is often a lengthy process. This, coupled with the inherent lag in adopting innovations in global healthcare systems, felt regressive and ultimately that it was impacting patient care. And that’s how I found myself in the captive insurance industry, where some of these challenges could be addressed.

My role at MAXIS allows me to work closely with captives, ensuring they can keep up with advancements, formulate policies that reflect the latest treatments, and tailor coverage to employees’ specific needs. Where traditional insurance companies might struggle to keep up with innovations, leading to delays in coverage and access to new treatments, captives offer an agile and customisable solution which leverages real-time data and potentially manages costs more effectively. These compelling factors made it clear that working in captive insurance was the right path for me.

“Captives offer an agile and customisable solution which leverages real-time data and potentially manages costs more effectively.”

Who inspired you or acted as a mentor in your career?

Oprah Winfrey once said: “A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.” I would like to add that a mentor is someone who sees the hope inside you, even when you can’t, and invests wholeheartedly in that glimmer.

Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to have mentors who not only saw the potential in me but also helped me recognise it within myself. For that, I am truly grateful. My mentors have been diverse and invaluable, each contributing to my professional journey. If I must choose just one it would be Maria Morris, the former EVP and head of the Global Employee Benefits business at MetLife. Her guidance and support have been instrumental in my development, and I’m grateful for that. 

How can mentorship and sponsorship programmes be designed to better support the career development of women?

Organisations should reconsider the ways support is offered. Rather than traditional one-on-one mentoring, a group approach with a number of mentors and mentees can be more effective.

This approach provides each member of the group with a diverse range of perspectives and support which they can use throughout their careers. It also reduces reliance on single connections and alleviates some of the pressure on mentors.

Deliberately connecting women to diverse external mentorship networks can provide them with more sources of information, ideas and potential career opportunities, and can enhance their influencing skills and visibility in the industry as a whole.

Last but certainly not the least: leveraging technology within the mentor process could be key. Using technology for matching, scheduling, and content curation can help with a more personalised development programme and can help to create robust mentorship/sponsorship programmes tailored to women’s unique needs in the industry.

In what ways can companies in the sector create a more inclusive culture that actively promotes gender diversity at all levels?

Corporate efforts to achieve diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) often face criticism for being symbolic or superficial. To avoid this, care should be taken to ensure that DE&I offerings are truly systematic and structural so that they are tangible and have a positive impact on people’s lives.

This is relevant for all companies around the world, not just those in the captives space. However, companies can foster an authentically inclusive culture by leveraging a captive to support their DE&I objectives.

They can do this by:

• removing exclusions or expanding definitions in employee benefits plans that disproportionately impact certain employee groups
• offering more inclusive benefits such as increased coverage limits or expanded dependent eligibility
• enabling these changes even when local insurers may be unwilling due to market practices or pricing concerns.

Offering products and services that properly address currently overlooked areas is key to fostering an inclusive culture. At MAXIS, we strive to find solutions to problems that have been inadvertently overlooked, resulting in certain groups being marginalised or subpar treatment being offered, such as women’s and family health.

This has largely been kept out of the sphere of employee benefits coverage, but it’s something that people want and need.

By collaborating with our partner in this space, our clients are able to offer support to women and families during all stages of life from puberty, fertility concerns, family planning and pregnancy, all the way through to childcare, menopause and beyond.

Solutions like these can be crucial to creating a more inclusive workplace where people feel that their needs are being listened to, and that promotes gender diversity throughout organisations.

Strategies like these can help to create a more inclusive and responsive benefits system that truly meets the diverse needs of our global workforce.

What are your ambitions?

My ambition, or what I’d call my vision for the future, is closely tied to addressing the pitfalls we see in our healthcare system.

We have wound up in the US with a private healthcare system where if we aren’t sick, we aren’t considered a source of profit, so we aren’t seen or visible to the system. Profit is often prioritised over patient wellbeing and volume is incentivised over value.

This perpetuates a reactive, illness-focused model where we respond to symptoms after they manifest, rather than promoting wellness and preventing illness before it occurs. The system is structured around the premise that people are passive recipients of care, rather than active participants in their own health.

Fortunately, my role as chief health and wellness officer at MAXIS provides me with the opportunity to target these areas and drive innovation, for instance by strategising on innovative payment models and reducing wastage in the system.

Currently, we are focusing on this aspect from a cancer care perspective. I am committed to driving positive change by ensuring that cutting-edge treatments and technologies are accessible to those who need them. I also aim to address gaps in current product offerings, and to integrate wellness and preventive care with insurance in a way that makes it a way of life.

Promoting prevention and early intervention is still the most powerful weapon in our toolbox to improve outcomes and cost and yet many employers seemed to have overlooked this vital area. Rather than focusing solely on treating illness, clients may want to consider prioritisation of prevention and early intervention by offering incentives for routine check-ups, screenings, and preventive care, covering evidence-based preventive services and treatments without cost-sharing.

Additionally, I aspire to mentor and support the next generation of professionals, helping them navigate the complexities of our industry and reach their full potential. My ultimate goal is to contribute to a more responsive, inclusive, and patient-centred insurance landscape that better serves diverse and evolving needs, fostering a healthier and more equitable future for all.

Click here to read Captive International’s first Influential Women in Captive Insurance publication, celebrating the women transforming the captive sector through their sustained excellence and leadership.

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