Kim has been a member of the Availity team since before the company even had a name. She joined Project Topaz in 2000 as a member of Florida Blue’s technical staff, working as a developer to create what we all know as Availity today. In her role as Principal Architect, Data Solutions, she enjoys sharing her expertise with other members of the team. She finds joy in seeing how far the company has come and looks forward to seeing the company continue to grow with the bright new talent joining Availity.
Kim grew up in a small farm town in Illinois. When she went to college in a larger neighboring town, she studied life sciences before transferring to Jacksonville University in Florida, where she added a Computer Information Systems (CIS) minor to her studies. She worked as an assistant to the Chair of CIS and spent her summers teaching local elementary school teachers how to use technology presentation tools. After graduating, Kim joined Florida Blue as a developer, which led to her work on Project Topaz.
Today in her position as a Data Architect at Availity, she supports enterprise-wide reports. This allows her to work with all product and application teams to understand their products and data flows deeply enough to design data storage and reporting needs. Working across teams is something Kim enjoys greatly. A recent project to migrate the data platform from Hadoop to AWS brought talent together from across the company to achieve what needed to be done. She recalls the project as a beautiful testament to what Availity can do as a company, acting like a family to come together to get the project across the finish line.
For Kim, Availity sets itself above other companies by supporting team members with a plethora of tools for self-improvement, opportunities for growth, generous personal time, and a culture she classifies as family-style support. This support has been important to Kim as she helped her aging parents navigate the healthcare system. The eye-opening experience helped her better understand CEO Russ Thomas’ message to leverage Availity to help fix the healthcare system and made her proud to be a part of the Availity team.
Kim enjoys challenging herself with AWS certifications. Recently, she passed the test for the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification. She started the journey with the Cloud Quest Challenge sponsored by Engineering Excellences and followed along with the suggested study series on SkillBuilder. Now, she is in the Solution Architect & Security Tournament. Kim is excited to continue to learn and grow through AWS certifications.
Outside of work, Kim recharges by escaping to the beach. Closer to home, she enjoys watching black and white movies with her dog, Ryely, on the patio. Kim’s hobbies and interests include dogs, RVing, gardening, wasgij puzzles, and woodworking. Her favorite book is the Bible, and she loves the movie “300.” Kim will never say no to taco night!
To people considering Availity as their next career move, she shared, “There is no shortage of work here at Availity. If you want to learn or try something new, there are ample opportunities!”
Thank you for your dedication, Kim!