Five Questions with Helen Wolford

She was working remotely many years before it was common, is committed to broadening her culinary horizons, and finds herself completely at home with numbers and data. Meet PartnerSource Senior Business Analyst Helen Wolford.

How does your role support the PartnerSource mission?

I do data analysis on employee losses that occur for our clients. I share that work with other people in my company, and I enjoy that I’m able to help if they have questions about the data. One of the big things that we do for clients is benchmarking, looking at various categories of information that will be of interest to the client. Losses are a big portion of that, of course, but we also look at their plan components, insurance and medical management. We are comparing them to find out how they stack up against other PartnerSource clients in their industry, benchmarking their costs and outcomes. That’s important. We really believe that our procedures enable our clients to have a better loss picture in the end. Our goal is for claims to close quickly, with a satisfactory result that has the employee back at work and with a better medical outcome than he or she might have had without our processes.

What is something people may be surprised to learn about you?

That I have lived in the same house, off and on, since I was five years old. I was born in El Paso and raised in Oklahoma City after my dad retired from the Army. I moved to Dallas for about 20 years and then needed to come home to help my parents out. I had worked for PartnerSource about a year at that point and hated having to leave the company to move home--but then, PartnerSource asked me to work remotely. That was 14 years ago, and I was the company’s first teleworker.

What do you like to do in your free time?

Recently, a friend and I decided to try new restaurants together so, every week, we are going to eat somewhere we have not been before. Last weekend, we went to a diner and I had chicken fried steak and he had fried catfish. We have been to a couple of different Mexican restaurants, and we love Asian. The last Asian place we visited was a Vietnamese/Chinese fusion, an unusual twist. We’ve been having fun with this.

Do you have a favorite meal?

Though I love trying places that are new to me, I also really enjoy going to a Jimmy’s Egg restaurant near me where they know my name. I usually visit at least once over the weekend, and I order their whole wheat pancakes with fresh blueberries.

Where do you like to vacation?

In my family, there were two boys and three girls, and now, we are spread out across the country. I have enjoyed visiting my family, including my four nieces and three nephews, wherever they are. These trips have taken me to Washington, D.C.; Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and even Germany, Amsterdam, Hawaii and Okinawa.