“If you build it, [they] will come.”

Earlier this month, I participated in the 16th annual Field of Dreams Dinner and Auction at Safeco Field, which has raised more than $21M since its inception to support the life-changing services provided around the globe by the Pacific Northwest’s own Medical Teams International (MTI). And on a night usually reserved for spending time with Tia and the kids, Dylan and Lily, I was instead with another family – my extended Cambia work family.

Cambia Health Solutions is made up of a family of companies that includes Regence BlueShield, a “World Series” sponsor of this weekend’s dinner. Each of the companies within the Cambia family are all bonded together through a single Cause – a dream, if you will – to transform health care, and in so doing, to create a person-focused and economically sustainable system.

And much like the dreamers in another Field of Dreams, we know that “if you build it, [they] will come.” But dreamers don’t dream alone, and in this, Cambia has excellent partners. In a joint development project between Cambia and MTI – the Health Information Program (HIP), and later supported by Microsoft, we’ve been leveraging technology to create a more effective medical reporting process for the health care professionals serving more than 350,000 refugees living in the various settlements in Uganda, and in particular, the Nakivale settlement in southwestern Uganda. For more about this project, check out the video below.

Prior to the event, I had the opportunity to help host two employees from the MTI Uganda office, including Julius Mubangizi who serves as the IT Director there. He was born in Rwanda and arrived in Uganda as a refugee himself and is now working with MTI to serve refugees fleeing violence. He is implementing the Health Information Program in clinics throughout Uganda and I asked him what he would like Cambia employees to know about the program and the impact it is having and his response was succinct, but powerful, “Technology saves lives.”

Every day, we work to improve the health and wellbeing of our members through different tools and strategies. But to hear from Julius the impact that my colleagues at Cambia are having not only in our own communities, but across the globe, it demonstrated to me the value of dreaming big.  Much like Doc Graham, we all have our individual dreams – like getting an at-bat in the Big Show – but in a shared dream, a shared goal, a shared Cause, the true reward is in the impact we have beyond ourselves, as shown in the clip below. And I’m proud to be part of a work family that can help teach my kids these kinds of lessons.

(Also, as a moment of personal disclosure, this is one of my all-time favorite movies that I've seen countless times and the ending still gets me every single time.)