Content area
Full text
Her pet peeve is super-sized portions.
A hobby is cooking, but with a focus on eliminating unnecessary fat and calories from common recipes.
Exercise is a daily occurrence.
For Pita Moya, her dedication to health doesn't stop when she walks out of the executive director's office at the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.
These little lifestyle pieces all fall together into her strategy for how Kentuckians, and everyone else, can improve their health.
"She has this view that if people gave it a little bit of thought they could introduce a healthier lifestyle without going overboard," says Steve Moya, Rita Moya's husband and chief marketing officer for Humana Inc. "I don't find her to be a zealot, but I do find she has given this a lot of thought. ... I think that's good for somebody with a foundation that's dedicated to improving lives from a health standpoint."
And in addition to having the passion and lifestyle to match the goals of her position, Rita Moya also has the health background and public policy credentials to back it up.
In the year and a half since Moya took the helm as the first executive director of the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, the organization has gathered input through a series of community meetings and a statewide forum on Medicaid.
The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, a nonprofit organization, was established in 2000 to address Kentuckians' unmet health needs. It is funded with $45 million from the settlement of a lawsuit stemming from the 1993 merger of Anthem Inc. and Blue Cross & Blue Shield.
"We've been able to meet with lots of people throughout the state and glean from them what the foundation should focus on to have the most impact," Moya says.
Based on the community meetings, Moya and foundation officials found that fitness, nutrition, tobacco use, access to Medicaid and mental health services and physical health will be among the hottest topics to address.
The foundation also created endowed chair positions at both the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky and established the Models that Work program. Models that Work is designed to find successful programs throughout the state that could be expanded.
To handle all that, Moya has logged...