Ernesto Flores was born in Mexico City, Mexico and lived in various countries before earning his Bachelor of Science in biochemistry and psychology from the University of Ottawa, in Ottawa, Ontario Canada. After determining that he wanted to pursue a career where he would be able to affect change in the healthcare system, Ernesto pursued the MPH program here at DePaul, where he was also President of the Public Health Student Organization. Throughout the program, Ernesto showed interest in a macro-scale approach to public health from the local, state, and national level. As his focus became even clearer, Ernesto honed in on a policy-orientated practicum. With the help of the MPH faculty, he was matched at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago where he worked in the Policy and Advocacy Department contributing to legislative articles in the Affordable Care Act, as well as learning the practical application of program development and evaluation.
Ernesto graduated from the MPH program with distinction in 2016. Following graduation he completed an Executive Fellowship at Kindred Healthcare, a long term acute care hospital group where he rotated through the business and ancillary services provided by the hospital gaining an understanding of the operational and administrative workings from the provider side of healthcare. After completing the fellowship, he pursued an opportunity in the payer field at Blue Cross Blue Shield, where he currently works as an Associate Divisional Strategy Consultant. In this role, Ernesto is part of a team that works on value based care models and programs for specialty health conditions, like end stage renal disease, total joint replacements, and oncology. He works together with experts in the field to understand how patient’s healthcare outcome trends are affected by provider’s performance and helps design models that incentivize physicians towards increasing the quality of care delivered to their patients and ultimately move the needle towards a fee for value approach to healthcare delivery.
Ernesto continues to learn more about the public health field and the healthcare industry every day and enjoys keeping in touch with various classmates from his ’16 graduating class, as well as the ’17 class.