A professional with an industry-wide reputation for managing legal operations in healthcare, Mónica Paramés has spent a significant fraction of her legal career at the helm of the legal department of Sanitas, Spain’s largest healthcare company and subsidiary of Bupa. Currently serving as general counsel of the group’s Europe and Latin America (ELA) market unit, Paramés has consistently impressed with her efforts to drive organisational change, most recently receiving praise for her contributions to implementing the group innovation and digitization strategy. ‘We have become mentors in the digitalisation of our businesses, making part of all the project teams from the very beginning to the end,’ she shares. ‘This meant embedding a LEAN culture, meaning to act only on fact and not on opinion and work together as a company -not in silos- adopting a digital mind-set to the way we work and to solving customer problems’.

Besides embedding an innovative and transformational culture at the core of her team, Paramés has contributed to the implementation of a number of innovative projects with or without a digital component, such as for instance Santis’ BLUA project – the first digital insurance product for the Spanish market. This project gives the opportunity to customers to have video-consultations and instant messaging with their doctors. ‘During the last six months the legal team has been working in the improvement of the platform taking into account the experience of the doctors and customers that have used it. Several other medical practices have been incorporated to the video-consultation services menu,’ Paramés explains. In regard to Sanitas’ big data development project, Paramés’ team has also actively participated in the design and negotiation of a “data lake” with different market players, reaching an agreement with an IT provider to implement a project to optimise not only the storage of the info and data but also the use of such data within the drawn architecture.

Internationalisation has been another significant area of excellence for Paramés and her legal team, which has most recently facilitated the acquisition of the remaining stake in Bupa’s Chilean subsidiary by means of a takeover bid, followed by a delisting and squeeze out process and finally by several corporate changes. Paramés is particularly proud of the way both the Chile and Spain teams worked together to attain these goals. ‘It was not just legal work but also coordinating the businesses in a landscape of innovation and continuous improvement [within the framework] of Bupa’s culture, policies and best practices,’ she says.