Ana Rita González
Senior Vice President
Fleishman-Hillard Miami
Ana Rita González-Velázquez joined Fleishman-Hillard Miami/Latin America as a vice president in charge of healthcare and social marketing. She brings to Fleishman-Hillard a strong background in healthcare issues and policy development, strategic planning, third-party coalition building, public education, and message-platform development and implementation, as well as experience in launching health-services products.
Ms. González-Velázquez served for nine years as a hospital and health systems adviser for the World Health Organization’s Pan-American Health Organization (WHO-PAHO). During her time with WHO-PAHO, she served in Barbados, covering the English-speaking regions of the Caribbean, Costa Rica, and Peru. Her work was instrumental in helping to rebuild the hospital network and in strengthening the management capacity in the eastern Caribbean, Belize, and Guyana. Her work with these countries allowed the health sector to use a strategic-planning approach and an information-based decision-making style for the first time. She also provided strategic counsel and third-party coalition building so that the organization could receive international financing from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank for health reforms in Costa Rica and Peru. In both countries, Ms. González-Velázquez was instrumental in developing a message platform and ensuring a marketing mix that enabled the ministries of health to successfully assume the new leadership role assigned to them by the health sector reforms, while reducing their health-services provider role to a secondary one. During her tenure with WHO-PAHO, she designed and developed social marketing programs for prescription drug usage, family planning, developmental pediatrics, AIDS, responsible use of health services and medical devices, medical malpractice issues, breast-feeding, high-risk pregnancies, and oral health. She also performed crisis management work after a radiation therapy accident in Costa Rica.
Previously, Ms. González-Velázquez worked in the hospital industry in Puerto Rico, managing government- and privately-owned hospitals, specializing in getting hospitals out of bankruptcy. During this time she developed various image-building projects, launched new health-service products, improved board of directors and medical staff relations, dealt with quality-of-care and client-satisfaction issues, and strengthened the financial positions of the hospitals.
Most recently, Ms. González-Velázquez free-lanced for Porter Novelli Florida as a senior creative strategist. She developed public relations and social marketing strategies for healthcare, consumer, and technology clients.
