Community Health Collective

Community Health Collective Podcast

Host: Jill Steeley

Indecisiveness has a cost, and Jill Steeley paid it. When she was a health center CEO, her team spent 12 months analyzing whether to start a weight-loss program while a competitor in the community simply launched one. The cost: roughly 500 patients and $900,000 in revenue. In this solo episode, Jill tells that story, owns her part in it, and does the math most leaders never see, about $75,000 for every month the decision sat on the agenda. She explains why clinically trained leaders are especially likely to get stuck here, then walks through the three things she does now: decide at 80% of the information, put a deadline on the decision itself, and ask the regret question. The flip is the part that stays with you. Waiting is a decision too, and it's the one mistake nobody will ever call a mistake. This one is for health center CEOs and senior leaders with an item on the agenda that keeps rolling to next month.

Highlights:

• The story: 12 months of market analysis, a competitor who went first, and about 500 patients lost
• The math: roughly $900,000, about $1,800 a patient, and about $75,000 for every month of waiting
• Why waiting feels safe, and why it's still a decision with a price
• Why a business decision is not a diagnosis, and what that means for clinically trained leaders
• The 80% rule, and the one question that tells you when you have enough
• How to put a deadline on a decision, and how a three-month pilot makes a big decision smaller
• The regret question: a year from now, which will you regret more, acting now or waiting for more data?
• Homework: find the oldest item on your leadership agenda, price it, and pick a date

Quotes from the episode:

"It's not like a direct cost that is glaringly staring at you in a budget line item, but it is a real cost, and I did pay it."

"Waiting is also a decision. It just doesn't feel like one."

"It's the one mistake you can make over and over that no one will ever call an actual mistake."

"A business decision is not a diagnosis. In a diagnosis, the answer already exists, and your job is to find it."

Mentioned in this episode:

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. A 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com

Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

Community Health Collective - The Monday Morning Problem Episode

Host: Jill Steeley

Jill Steeley just registered for a November conference, added up the bill, and landed at about $3,500 before she'd learned a thing. And that's only half the receipt. The other half is what she calls the Monday morning problem: the conference ends, you go home, and on Monday morning you're alone with all those ideas and none of the help to do them. In this episode, Jill runs the full math on a conference versus the FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp, walking through the direct costs, the time costs that never show up on an expense report, and the three things you don't come home with: implementation tools, someone to call, and content built for your health center. Then she flips it. Jill is still going to her conference, and she explains why the mistake isn't going, it's asking a conference to do a cohort's job. This one is for health center CEOs and senior leaders deciding how to spend a professional development budget in a year when the coverage cliff is on the calendar.

Highlights:

• The full receipt on one conference, one person: about $3,500 direct and roughly $7,000 once you count time
• A quick formula for pricing a day of your own time (annual salary divided by 260)
• The five hidden line items: days out, the catch-up, no tools to implement, no one to call, and content that isn't built for your health center
• The same math run on the fully virtual Bootcamp, including the surprise that the learning hours are about the same
• Why conferences are great at connection and terrible at implementation
• The one question to ask about your budget this year: which option changes my numbers by April?
• Homework: find your last conference receipt and name one thing you changed because of it

Quotes from the episode:

"The conference ends, you go home, and on Monday morning you're alone with all of those ideas and none of the help to actually do them."

"The mistake isn't going to a conference. The mistake is expecting a conference to do the job of a cohort."

"I don't go expecting to come home with a plan, because I know I won't, and I've stopped being disappointed about that."

"It's not the content. It's whether you're by yourself with it afterward."

Mentioned in this episode:

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. A 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com

Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

Community Health Collective Podcast

Host: Jill Steeley

Jill calls it the Self-Checkout Hire - and it started with her 18-year-old son, who makes $17 an hour at Lowe's mostly helping people through self-checkout. Meanwhile, health centers are paying nurses, MAs, and front-desk staff to do the same kind of work by phone: portal signups, check-in, password resets, and rescheduling. In this solo episode, Jill makes the case for putting one young, tech-fluent person in your lobby and exam rooms whose whole job is getting patients onto the portal and scheduling themselves, walks through the five jobs of that role, runs the math on what it frees up, and names the prerequisite most centers skip - templated provider schedules. Then she flips the conversation: online scheduling isn't a nice-to-have anymore, and the belief that patients don't have a choice is a myth health centers can't afford. This one's for CEOs, COOs, and practice managers who are tired of watching licensed staff play phone tag.

Highlights:

• Why Lowe's puts a $17-an-hour employee next to the self-checkout - and what health centers can learn from it
• The hidden cost of licensed staff doing portal signups, password resets, and rescheduling by phone
• The 5 jobs of the Self-Checkout Hire: greet and enroll, teach self-scheduling, be the help desk, speed up check-in, and track the number
• The rough math: about $44K a year, fully loaded, versus the licensed hours you get back
• Why templated schedules are the gate to patient self-scheduling
• The captive-patient myth - and why patients who want to book at 7:30 at night will go somewhere that lets them

Quotes from the episode:

"Here's the thing, none of those tasks requires a professional license to help with."

"When your most expensive people spend their day on ten dollar tasks, you end up paying for it twice... because nobody went to nursing school to reset passwords."

"I call it the captive patient myth, the belief that patients will put up with whatever we offer because they have nowhere else to go."

"This work is really hard, but some of the best fixes are simpler than we think. Sometimes it's just a friendly person standing next to a machine helping a patient."

Mentioned in this episode:

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. A 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com

Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

Community Health Collective Podcast

Host: Jill Steeley

Jill has been getting the same question three different ways, always at the end of a call: "I hear you on the four levers, but if I can only focus on one right now, which should I pull first?" In this episode she says plainly that she's been answering it wrong - not wrong exactly, just answering the question people asked instead of the one that matters. The right question is which lever pays out when you actually need the money, because every lever has a lead time, and those lead times run from 30 days on one end to four years on the other. She opens with a correction she hears constantly and has made herself: January 1st is not the day the money disappears. The redetermination clock runs from each patient's own original application date, so there is no single deadline - patients roll through renewals a few hundred at a time and the losses accumulate across all of 2027. Which means replacement revenue has to land in 2027, which means the 12-to-18-month levers had to start in Q3 of 2026. Then she ranks all four by speed: cost and productivity at 30 to 90 days, patient retention at 6 to 9 months, revenue diversification at 6 to 18 months, and market presence at two to four years. The flip lands near the end and it's the opposite of what logic suggests. The fast lever is still there in January and in June - cost reduction doesn't expire. The slow lever is the only one with an expiring start date. So you pull two, and the fast one doesn't just fund the slow one, it shortens it: money freed up from vendor contracts or a renegotiated commercial rate gets reinvested in market presence, and that four-year lead time starts shrinking. Jill closes with what she got wrong in her own turnaround - she rebranded in year one but didn't start the real market presence work until year two, and because that's the lever underneath the other three, the delay pushed everything downstream. If you're building a Q4 budget and wondering whether a revenue line that pays out in 2029 is a luxury you can't afford this week, this one is for you.

Highlights:

• Why "which lever should I pull first?" is the wrong question, and the one to ask instead
• The correction on January 1st - there is no single redetermination date, it runs from each patient's own application date
• What actually changes: expansion adults 19 to 64, six-month renewals, 80 hours a month of work requirements verified at application and renewal
• Lever two, reduce costs and increase productivity: 30 to 90 days, and why the money is already yours
• Lever four, retain patients: 6 to 9 months, and the COO who recovered $700,000 in eight months without adding a single service
• Lever one, increase and diversify revenue: 6 to 18 months, including what Jill learned about payer contracts from sitting on the Blue Cross Blue Shield side of the table
• Lever three, build market presence: two to four years, a 700-person community survey, and 27% brand recognition to 94%
• The flip: the fast lever never expires, the slow one does - so pull two on the same day
• Why the fast lever doesn't just fund the slow lever, it shortens it
• The mistake Jill made in her own turnaround, and the years she thinks it cost her
• Two pieces of homework you can start this week, one fast and one slow

Quotes from the episode:

Mentioned in this episode:

The free live webinar with Steve Weinman on Friday, September 18th at 10:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM Eastern - a repeat of the September 11th session, same registration link. All four levers in detail, four health centers doing this now, and how to pick yours. Live attendees get the HR 1 exposure worksheet, the HR 1 90-day action plan, and the offense playbook, plus a birthday trivia giveaway. Replay goes to everyone who registers. Register: webinar.fqhc-ceo.com/register

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. An executive-level, 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com

Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

Community Health Collective Podcast

Host: Jill Steeley Guest Host: Steve Weinman

Steve Weinman came back from NACHC's Community Health Institute in Las Vegas with one observation that says more than any policy briefing: they held a closed-door session called Protecting the CEO, and you had to prove you were a health center CEO before they'd let you in the room. In this episode Jill and Steve unpack what that room means, and what everyone outside it was talking about. The number that dominated the hallways was 375,000 - the touchpoints a 25,000-patient Medicaid panel generates once you stack monthly work-requirement verification on top of doubled redeterminations. Steve walks through the panel math so you can run it for your own center: panel size, times a 30% procedural loss rate, times $650 per member per year. For a 25,000-member panel that's $4.9 million at risk, and not one dollar of it comes from a patient who actually became ineligible. Jill and Steve also cover the mergers-and-acquisitions conversations happening all over the conference and what those really signal, why a three-day coverage lapse can change your reimbursement, the 340B and retroactive Medicaid plays that put cash in the door fast, and why your enrollment team just became your retention team. Then Steve says the thing that reframes the whole episode: after 42 years inside health centers, he doesn't think this is a funding problem at all. It's a business model problem. Which is actually good news, because a business model is something you control. If you're a health center leader looking at January 1st and doing quiet math about what happens to your budget, this one is for you.

Highlights:

• What Steve heard in every hallway conversation at CHI - and the closed-door CEO session that tells you how the room really feels
• 375,000 touchpoints a year: what doubled redeterminations plus monthly work-requirement verification actually creates on a 25,000-member panel
• The panel math, step by step: panel size × 30% procedural loss × $650 per member per year = your number
• Why a three-day coverage lapse isn't a rounding error - new plan, new benefits, new startup friction, different reimbursement
• Why the mergers and acquisitions conversations at CHI are a symptom, not a strategy
• What's actually changing January 1st, and why 50 states doing it 50 ways is the part nobody can plan around yet
• Your enrollment team just became your retention team - and how to repurpose the people already in your building
• Fast cash right now: 340B lines of business, retroactive Medicaid recovery, and commercial payer contracts you haven't renegotiated in years
• The four levers Jill pulled to take a health center from 62.5% federal dependency to 17% - with a 42% uninsured rate
• Steve's first move for anyone with four months on the clock: get with your CFO, run your number, and take it to your board before they're surprised

Quotes from the episode:

"It was sort of this secret CEO session that you actually had to prove that you were a health center CEO before they would let you in the room."

"It's not from actual loss of eligibility, but just having them throw so many barriers in front of the patients that they don't make it to the finish line."

"Every touch point that gets missed is a lapsed record, and it's basically money walking out the door."

"It is definitely not a funding problem. It is a business model problem."

"If you put one hand in the oven and one hand in the ice box, the average temperature is a nice, comfortable 70 degrees, but one of them is frozen and the other one's on fire."

Mentioned in this episode:

Steve Weinman, principal at FQHC Associates and Jill's co-lead on the CEO Connect Bootcamp, with 42 years inside community health centers.

NACHC's Community Health Institute (CHI), including the governance workshop on mergers and acquisitions and the closed-door "Protecting the CEO" session.

The free live webinar on Friday, September 11th at 10:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM Eastern - "I've Already Run a Health Center at 42% Uninsured: Here's Why the Medicaid Cliff Doesn't Scare Me." Register: webinar.fqhc-ceo.com/register

Episode #43, where Jill tells her own turnaround story in detail: www.jillsteeley.com/podcast

RetroCAID, from Howard Archer at Fix Healthcare Technology - retroactive Medicaid recovery on a pure contingency basis. Schedule a call with their CEO: https://fixht.com/meeting/retrocaid-qa-jsteeley/

Vital Interaction, the patient engagement platform Jill and Steve have hosted in Bootcamp sessions on managing redetermination outreach at scale. To schedule a call with VI and get a 33% discount go to: https://guidance.vitalinteraction.com/jill-steeley

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. A 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com

Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

Host: Jill Steeley

Jill takes you inside the health center she inherited in Helena, Montana - nearly a million dollars in the red, a 42% uninsured rate, 37% staff turnover, a dental clinic shuttered for years, and no new provider recruited in five. The board gave her 12 months to turn it around or they were closing the doors. This episode is the story of what actually moved the needle, and it wasn't more grants. It was a question. Jill stopped asking "how do we get more funding?" and started asking "why is our business model built to need it?" From there she walks through the four levers she now teaches in every framework - increase and diversify recurring revenue, reduce costs while increasing productivity, build market presence, and retain patients through exceptional care - and the guilt that sits underneath all of it: the belief that profit is greed and that serving the poor means staying poor. The turnaround took grant dependency from 62.5% of the budget down to 17%, grew the insured patient line 20% year after year, and put millions in reserves after a near-million-dollar deficit. And it expanded access for everyone, insured and uninsured. If you're a health center leader who's been cutting staff, services, and sites because there's nothing left to cut, this one is for you.

Highlights:

• What Jill walked into: a near-million-dollar deficit, 42% uninsured, 37% turnover, a closed dental clinic, and five years without a successful provider recruitment
• Why the board's 12-month ultimatum changed how she thought about the problem
• The epiphany - swapping "how do we get more funding?" for "why does our model need it?"
• The mindset that keeps health centers stuck: profit is greed, we serve the poor so we must be poor
• Lever 1: increase and diversify revenue - specifically recurring revenue you control
• Lever 2: reduce costs while increasing productivity, without asking providers to do more with less
• Lever 3: build a real market presence, not "hey, can the front desk run our Instagram?"
• Lever 4: retain patients through exceptional care, because retention is cheaper than acquisition
• The results: 62.5% grant dependency down to 17%, 20% annual growth in insured patients, millions in reserves
• One CEO who opened an in-house pharmacy and added over $2 million in annual revenue

Quotes from the episode:

• "This is a very slow-turning ship, but it is a ship that can course correct."
• "We can't make a profit, we're a nonprofit. We serve the underserved. We have to be poor because we serve the poor."
• "My argument has always been no margin, no mission. If your doors are closed, we couldn't serve anyone."
• "I'm not really a financial person, I'm a business model person."
• "Why is our business model built to need those federal programs and those federal grants?"

Mentioned in this episode:

Free webinar with Steve Weinman - Friday, September 11 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific / 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Jill and Steve go deeper on the turnaround story and walk through how to pull all four levers at your own health center. https://webinar.fqhc-ceo.com/register

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. A 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com

Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

The Community Health Collective Podcast

Have you ever felt like you lost line of sight on something in your health center? Not that anything is wrong, exactly - you couldn't point at a problem if someone asked you to. It's quieter than that. There's a part of your organization you used to watch closely, and somewhere along the way you stopped, and you can't remember the day that changed. In this episode Jill names that feeling and gives it a diagnosis: a closed loop, where the only person who can see the work is the person doing the work. She walks through the four signs you've got one, the two doors closed loops form through (tenure and relief, and neither one is malice), what they actually cost in dollars and in time-to-detection, and the two fixes that don't require you to confront anybody. The counter-intuitive part lands near the end - a closed loop doesn't just hide information from you, it makes asking about the information feel like an accusation, and that's what keeps it closed. If you've ever caught yourself rehearsing how to ask your own team a question you're entitled to ask, this one is for you.

Highlights:

• The four signs you've quietly lost line of sight on part of your organization
• Why "everything looks fine" is not evidence of anything
• The two doors a closed loop forms through - tenure and relief - and why neither one is anybody's fault
• Why your HRSA site visit, your annual financial audit, and your monthly financials are not the oversight you think they are
• Delegation versus abdication, and how to tell them apart before month 18
• Time to detection: the number nobody counts, and why it's the one that decides what a problem costs you
• The two-part fix - outside eyes on a schedule, and a line-of-sight floor you set for every function
• What to ask your team this week, and the sentence to finish on a blank page by yourself

Quotes from the episode:

Mentioned in this episode:

Matt Stevens, an attorney who does outside general counsel work for health centers and a guest presenter in the FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp.

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. A 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com

Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

A FQHC CEO Bootcamp member came back from a CFO training with a story that wouldn't leave Jill alone. Another CFO in the room - a peer, from a health center just like hers - told the whole group that every single visit should be 30 minutes. No caveats. And a room full of leaders who came to that training eager to learn "best practices." That's how a bad standard gets laundered into a best practice: somebody says it with confidence, with a title next to their name, and 18 months later it's just how we've always done it and nobody can tell you where it came from. In this solo episode Jill takes the whole thing apart - starting with the math nobody in that room ran (a 7.5-hour clinic day holds 15 patients at 30 minutes and 22 at 20, which is roughly $300,000 of capacity per provider per year), moving through the two places a universal 30-minute template actually comes from, and landing on the reframe that changes the conversation: shorter doesn't mean more rushed, shorter means better supported. She's clear that some visits genuinely need 40 minutes, and equally clear that those should be a slot type, not the entire template. If your standard slot is 30 minutes and your visits per day are sitting in the teens, this one is for you - because you don't have a provider problem, you have a template problem, and it's the cheapest problem on your whole list.

Highlights:

• Why a 30-minute standard is a capacity decision, not a clinical one - and what it quietly caps
• The math on one full-time provider: 15 visits versus 22, seven a day, ~1,500 visits and ~$300,000 of capacity a year
• The federal productivity standard (4,200 visits per physician, 2,100 per mid-level) that a 30-minute template mathematically guarantees you'll miss
• The two places a universal 30-minute template actually comes from, and why both feel reasonable
• Steve Weinman on the "my panel is sicker than everybody else's" problem - and why they can't all be right
• Nine minutes in the EHR for every 15 minutes with a patient, plus the hour and a half of pajama time
• Why the order matters: build the support first, then shorten the slot
• The three visit types that genuinely earn 40 minutes
• Three things to look for when you pull up your appointment template
• The one-thing homework: count your slot lengths, then put your visits-per-day number next to it

Quotes from the episode:

"A 30-minute standard is not a clinical decision. It's a capacity decision, and most of the people making that decision haven't really done the math on what it costs."

"Shorter doesn't mean more rushed. Shorter means better supported."

"The long visit should be a slot type. It should not be the entire template."

"Somebody says it at a training, it gets repeated in a hallway, then in a leadership meeting back home, and by the time it reaches your actual scheduling template, it carries the weight of a best practice. But it was just what one health center is doing."

Mentioned in this episode:

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. A 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com

Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

Host: Jill Steeley

You cannot answer a values objection with a training session. That's the line Jill keeps coming back to after a story a CEO told in one of her Bootcamp sessions — she rolled ambient scribes out to 50 providers, braced for a fight with her most tenured doctors, and got exactly two holdouts. Neither was over 40. Both were her youngest physicians, and they weren't afraid of the technology or confused by it. They objected on ethics and on environmental cost. In this episode Jill breaks down the three kinds of "no" that look identical from the outside — the capability no ("I can't"), the evidence no ("I don't trust it yet"), and the values no ("I don't think we should") — why only the first two shrink when you throw support at them, why the third one hardens and goes quiet when you ignore it, and the four moves that actually work on a values objection, none of which are another training session. The turn comes at the end: her 62-year-old docs adopted in week one, and the assumption cost that CEO more than the resistance ever did. If you're rolling out AI, a new EHR module, or any change at all right now, this one will save you months of planning aimed at the wrong person.

Highlights:

• Why 48 of 50 providers adopted ambient scribes — and why the two who didn't weren't who anyone expected
• The three kinds of no: capability, evidence, and values — and how to tell them apart in one conversation
• Why a capability no gets smaller over time and a values no gets bigger, quieter, and picks up allies
• What the younger physicians actually argued: patient consent, audio retention, model training, and the environmental cost of the data-center buildout
• Four moves for a values objection — name it out loud, get real answers from the vendor in writing, offer a real opt-out with a real expiration date, and don't make them the villain
• The reframe: your loudest ethical objector is a free early-warning system for the questions your board and your patients will ask in six months
• The bigger lesson — stop predicting who will resist, and go ask

Quotes from the episode:

"You cannot answer a values objection with a training session."

"They weren't afraid of the AI. They weren't confused by it. They understood the technology probably better than anyone else on the team."

"A capability no and an evidence no both get smaller over time if you provide added support. A values no can actually get bigger if you ignore it."

"The assumption cost her more than the resistance did."

• CEO Bootcamp — Jill & Steve Weinman’s program for health center leaders navigating strategic and financial decisions. www.fqhc-ceo.com

• Work with Jill — Email [email protected] or schedule a call at jillsteeley.com to talk through your needs.

Episode 39 ·

Guest: Alison Williams, Vital Interaction

Host: Jill Steeley

Jill's been saying it for months: the way health centers survive the Medicaid coverage cliff is by helping patients keep the coverage they're still eligible for. In this episode she brings on Alison Williams - 25 years in the health center movement, 10 of them inside a community health center in Upstate New York, another decade leading the national FQHC customer success team at Athena, and a former HRSA grant reviewer - to answer the question every CEO asks next: with what staff? Because HR1 doesn't make most of these patients ineligible. It makes them do paperwork twice a year, forever. Redeterminations move to every six months for expansion adults 19 to 64 starting January 1, 2027. Work requirements of 80 hours a month start the same day. And immigrant eligibility narrows on October 1, 2026, which is right around the corner. Somewhere between 11 and 17 million people are expected to lose coverage - compared to about 4 million when the public health emergency unwound. The difference, as Jill puts it, is that the PHE was a one-time event and this one never stops. Alison walks through how a Patient Management System like Vital Interaction turns that into three different message streams instead of one mass blast, why the first text a patient gets should be "add us as a contact" and not a reminder, how one two-minute provider video becomes dozens through AI, and what actually happens to the person whose entire job was calling patients all day. Jill also flags the funding angle most centers miss: this is exactly the kind of investment the Rural Health Transformation Program was built to pay for.

Highlights:

• The plain-English HR1 breakdown: six-month redeterminations and 80-hour work requirements starting January 1, 2027, immigrant eligibility cuts October 1, 2026
• Why 11 to 17 million is a different animal than the 4 million who lost coverage during the PHE unwinding - this one is ongoing, not a single event
• The trust step before the reminder: "Hi, this is Friendly Family Health Center. Please add us as a contact," plus QR codes at check-in and checkout
• One two-minute provider video, recorded at a desk, turned into dozens of personalized messages by AI - because patients do what their providers tell them, not what the front desk tells them
• Three HR1 buckets means three completely different messages - retention, work-hour documentation, and sliding fee for patients who genuinely lose eligibility
• Two-way texting that's actually multilingual: you text in English, the patient reads and replies in Spanish, and it comes back to you in English
• Follow-up you can dial: one health center runs 3-day, 5-day, 10-day, and 25-day touches, and patients drop off the list the moment they schedule
• The labor answer: the woman who called patients all day for two years, quit, and never had to be replaced
• Why a single retained Medicaid patient's PPS payment starts paying for the technology immediately
• Rural Health Transformation Program funding maps directly to this - IT modernization and chronic disease management
• Implementation runs 90 to 120 days after signing, and you need an executive sponsor, operations, and IT at the table or it turns into a struggle bus

Quotes from the episode:

"When people hear me say 'help your patients stay covered,' they're thinking about 10 years ago when we were stuffing envelopes. We can do this at scale now." - Jill Steeley

"Communicating with the right patient at the right time in the right way. It isn't a mass blast - because if it's going to be a mass blast, it's going to be just like another piece of paper they're not going to react to." - Alison Williams

"Is there one provider or one nurse or one care manager at your location that the community knows, respects, and trusts? That's the person we want." - Alison Williams

"We're not suggesting you take the human out of every engagement. We're saying those manual tasks that will suck the soul out of your employees - why are they doing that now?" - Jill Steeley

Guest disclosure: Alison Williams runs Trusted Advisors Consulting Group and states plainly in the episode that Vital Interaction is her partner and client. Jill has a partner relationship with Vital Interaction as well, and gets her clients a ~33% discount.

Links:

• Vital Interaction: www.vitalinteraction.com
• Schedule a call with Vital Interaction (Community Health Collective listeners get 33% off): https://guidance.vitalinteraction.com/jill-steeley
• Alison Williams: [email protected]· LinkedIn
• Episodes 35 and 36, referenced in this conversation: www.jillsteeley.com/podcast
• Free HR1 planning worksheet: email [email protected] with "HR1 plan" in the subject line
• FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp - next cohort opens in September