Introducing the 2026 Risk All Stars : Risk & Insurance

This year’s crop of Risk All Stars tended to make good use of tools commonly available as opposed to buying off-the-shelf solutions.

Congratulations to this year’s class of 16 Risk & Insurance Risk All Stars. These are professionals in the insurance ecosystem, that regardless of their job title, are charged with managing risk for their organizations.

In the decade or more that we have been running this contest, we have used three core criteria in judging this contest. The nominated or applying risk managers need to display creativity, passion and perseverance in deriving risk management solutions for their organizations.

For next year’s contest, let’s add to that list a fourth trait; initiative. For in many cases, past and present, it was the risk manager that identified a need, brought it to the attention of the organization and had the will and the fortitude to address it and solve for it.

We noticed something else this year. No small number of our winning risk managers relied on commonly available tools rather than buying a risk management system or some other solution from vendors.

Take the case of Cassi Gipson, director of risk management — insurance for the Encompass Health System and a 2026 Risk All Star.

Gipson leads a two-person team which supports 170-plus hospitals and more than 40,000 employees. Her organization needed a better way to collect and organize data if it were to manage risk effectively.

“While having a RMIS (Risk Management Information System) is the ideal solution, many of the systems are so robust and rich with capabilities that they are, with good reason, priced out of our budget,” Gipson wrote in her Risk All Star application.

“My solution has been to use the tools we’ve got to pull it all together. That has entailed using SharePoint worksheets to foster collaboration more effectively for tracking a number of functions like claim payments on complex insurance programs and self-insurance regulatory requirements and data by state.”

“I have become very familiar with Microsoft’s Power Automate! The forms and SharePoint worksheets have been pulled together in a OneNote notebook shared between the two of us and with other members of our larger team as needed. This is allowing us to quickly report claims, request COIs, track contract exceptions, and access information about our facilities,” she added.

Dave Blanchard, chief operating officer for Salus Insurance Services, and a 2026 Risk All Star, manages risk for a growing insurance operation. That group was also operating with a fragmented data collection and management dynamic.

“To solve the problem, I approached enterprise data governance as a formal business project rather than a technology initiative,” Blanchard wrote in his Risk All Star application.

“Before attempting to implement a solution, my first priority was to establish alignment across the organization on what information was required, how it should be defined, identify gaps in existing data, and clarify responsibilities and accountability.

“The first step was collaborating with data owners, subject matter experts, and executives to identify critical reporting requirements and understand existing pain points,” he said.

“Together, we differentiated mandatory data elements from “nice-to-have” information, established consistent formatting standards across current and legacy datasets, and developed standardized data submission timelines, validation procedures, and reporting requirements,” Blanchard wrote.

Blanchard and Gipson were not alone in their approach. These 2026 Risk All Stars were creative and determined in building systems to manage risk where none had existed before.

We’ve all heard the phrase “getting a seat at the table” — derived from the game of poker — as a metaphor for having a hand in corporate leadership. These risk managers aren’t just getting a seat at the table, they are running the game. &

The 2026 Risk All Stars