Michael Anne Kyle (she/her) decided to become a nurse on a bit of a whim.
As a college freshman majoring in language, she saw another girl in her dorm studying for a biology test and asked what her major was. It was nursing.
“I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’d be down to do that,’” she recalled. “And the next day I went and changed my major.”
Working in the ICU fueled her interest in patients’ hurdles navigating the health care system because she saw both the system’s failures and its opportunities, she said.
Kyle left full-time nursing to work in a community-based organization helping people enroll in insurance and get access to medications. She also worked for a New Jersey Medicaid accountable care organization. Partway through her Ph.D. in health policy at Harvard, Covid-19 hit, and she asked her advisors if she could go back to help in the ICU.
Now a BSN/Ph.D., Kyle still works as a nurse about one day a week, even as she’s started a new job as an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. She focuses on studying the administrative burdens faced by patients, like how insurance companies instituting prior authorization requirements delays cancer patients’ chemo treatments.
“There’s not really one huge pile of waste … for administrative burdens. There’s a lot of small problems that need to be picked off,” she said. “But what I’m excited about is, I don’t think we’ve really tried very hard [to eliminate them] yet.”
—Brittany Trang
