More Visits, Less Medicaid: The 3 Changes Coming for Your Patients (and the Plan to Meet Them) by Jill Steeley

On nearly every coaching call and inside the CEO Bootcamp, Jill hears the same question: "What are we going to do about our patients losing their Medicaid?"

So in this episode - released a day early to get the word out - she answers it.

HR1 (the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed July 4, 2025) isn't weather that just happens to your health center. It's a schedule. Three Medicaid changes are already on the calendar, and each one does the same thing: it turns a covered patient into an uninsured one. Same patient, same visit, a fraction of the revenue.

But a schedule is something a CEO can prepare for. Jill - a former FQHC CEO who inherited an $800K deficit, turned it into a multi-million-dollar reserve, and took her center from a 42% uninsured rate down to 12% through Medicaid expansion - breaks down what's coming and the three plays to meet it. No fear-mongering. No cutting staff, services, or sites. Just a plan to protect access, protect coverage, and go get revenue that's already sitting on your table.

This is a slow-turning ship. The time to get behind the wheel is now.

• The three HR1 changes headed at your Medicaid patients: six-month redeterminations (starting late 2026), 80-hour work requirements (states running them by early 2027 — six months away), and the immigrant eligibility cliff (October 1, 2026)
• Why the real danger is almost never true ineligibility — it's the paperwork, and it's predicted to be twice as bad as the COVID unwinding (up to 10 million losing coverage)
• The operational kicker most centers are missing: your Medicaid managed care plans are barred from determining work-requirement compliance — so the health center that helps patients document their hours is the one that keeps them covered
• Putting a real dollar figure on it: Medicaid is 40–65% of operating revenue for most centers, and the scenario to plan for is a 10–25% Medicaid shrink with uninsured rising to match (10–17 million people nationally)
• Play 1 — Defense: turn eligibility & enrollment into a retention machine, and use patient-engagement technology to communicate at scale (you don't need to hire more staff — you're the trusted voice)
• Play 2 — RetroCAID: turn write-offs back into paid claims by scrubbing every visit against Medicaid eligibility retroactively (365 days, rolling) — risk-free, no EHR integration, and they only bill when you collect. Urgent, because the retroactive window shrinks from 90 days to 1–2 months on January 1, 2027
• Play 3 — Offense: grow Medicare and commercial — the two payer lines HR1 doesn't touch. A Medicare or commercial patient brings 75–100% more revenue than a self-pay visit
• Why "we're going to protect access, protect coverage, and go get revenue" beats "tighten the belt and pray"

"HR1 is not weather. It's predictable and it’s on a schedule — a set of dates you can already see on the calendar. And anything you can see coming, you can prepare for."

More Visits, Less Medicaid: How Smart CEOs Are Preparing for the Coverage Cliff With Jill Steeley & Steve Weinman

📅 Thursday, July 9 · 11:30 AM MT / 1:30 PM ET · ~45 minutes + 15 minutes of live Q&A

Everything in this episode — gone deep, with the actual worksheets and workflows, not just theory. Between them, Jill and Steve (who grew a health center from $3M to $30M) have lived this. You'll walk out able to put a real dollar figure on your own exposure, with a defense plan to keep patients covered, a way to recover the Medicaid dollars you're writing off, and a plan to grow the lines HR1 can't touch.

👉 Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bOmGjMCTS-GJ1RxrrOXC4w#/registration

Don't let this one ambush you in Q4. You're not doing this alone.

• FQHC CEO Bootcamp — the program where we go deep on this work with health center leaders: www.fqhc-ceo.com
• The RetroCAID episode (Play 2) — Episode #11: $9K to $40K Monthly: How One Software Automatically Recovers Hidden Revenue for Health Centers, an interview with Howard Archer, CEO of Fix Healthcare IT: www.jillsteeley.com/podcast
• Webinar registration: Save your seat for July 9

Jill Steeley · Steeley Strategic Solutions 🌐 www.jillsteeley.com — grab free resources and take the Healthcare Leadership Style Quiz ✉️ [email protected] · 📞 406.579.0887

The Community Health Collective — honest conversations about the real barriers keeping health centers stuck, and what it takes to get unstuck. If this episode helped, share it with another community health leader. That's how we grow this collective, one connection at a time.

Host: Jill Steeley

Payer Mix, Not Encounters: The One Number To Track

Most health center leaders are watching the wrong number. They track encounters - visits up, schedules full, providers slammed - and call it progress. But here's the thing: more visits won't make your health center sustainable. In this episode I tell the story of a CEO I coach who sent me his encounter count like a monthly report card, proud and rising, until I asked him to pull his payer mix by revenue instead. That one shift changed everything. Encounters are a vanity metric. Payer mix is the real one. Revenue is decided by who you serve, not how many visits you do. I walk through the math on what one insured patient is actually worth, why Medicare is the most overlooked and most stable payer you've got, and the intentional plays to grow your insured lines - employer outreach, referral engines, and showing up in your community. And I take on the discomfort head-on: watching your payer mix isn't choosing money over mission. No margin, no mission. At PureView, focusing on insured patients the whole time I was CEO is exactly how we ended up serving more uninsured patients, not fewer. This one's for the CEO who's working harder every month and watching the revenue stay flat.

Highlights:

• Why encounters are a vanity metric and payer mix is the number that tells the truth
• The back-of-the-envelope math: how 1,000 insured patients compounds into roughly $2 million in new annual revenue
• Medicare as the most overlooked, most stable payer line - and the two moves to capture it (attract them, and stop under-billing the ones you already see)
• The intentional plays to grow payer mix: self-funded employers, referral engines, and community presence
• The reframe: no margin, no mission - margin is what funds the uninsured patient, not the other way around
• Your one-thing-this-week homework: pull your payer mix by revenue and ask if your commercial and Medicare lines are growing, flat, or shrinking

Quotes from the episode:

• "He really was watching and monitoring the wrong performance indicator."
• "Piling on encounters when your panel isn't insured just means you're busier on your way down."
• "The lever here isn't more. The lever is who."
• "We took an $800,000 deficit to millions of dollars in reserve and dropped our grant dependency from 62% down to 17%. Our mission didn't shrink, it grew - because the margin is what funded it."

• Revenue Diversification Guide - email me at [email protected] with Revenue Diversification in the subject line and I’ll send you my free guide.

• CEO Bootcamp — Jill & Steve Weinman’s program for health center leaders navigating strategic and financial decisions, where revenue cycle is a recurring topic. www.fqhc-ceo.com

• Work with Jill — Email [email protected] or schedule a call at jillsteeley.com to talk through where your revenue cycle is leaking.

If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to:

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode

• Leave a rating and review

• Share with a fellow health center leader who needs to hear this message

Have feedback or a topic request? Jill would love to hear from you!

Community Health Collective Podcast

Episode #33

Scaling Doesn’t Fix Problem - It Multiplies Them

Hosted by: Jill Steeley

――――――――――――――――――――

Every health center leader wants to grow - the second site, the new service line, the bigger patient panel - but far fewer talk honestly about what scaling actually does to an organization. In this solo episode, Jill Steeley makes the case that scaling doesn’t add, it multiplies: it takes your current operations, culture, finances, and leadership and runs all of it through a copy machine. Drawing on her own turnaround story - a health center that couldn’t recruit a single physician in five years and later had to turn providers away - she walks through why the first question is never “how do we grow,” but “is what we have right now worth multiplying?” She covers the leadership-bench trap, why systems have to scale before sites, how payer mix has to stay front and center, and the one gut-check question to run on your operation this week.

• The story behind a five-year recruiting drought - and how fixing the organization, not the pitch, turned it into turning providers away

• Why scaling multiplies everything you already are - your operations, culture, finances, and your dysfunction - instead of simply adding to it

• The first question to ask before you grow: is what we have right now actually worth multiplying?

• Why growth opportunities show up at the worst possible moment - and why two wobbling sites are worse than one

• The leadership-bench trap: why you can’t scale past your team, and what mergers and inherited leadership add to the problem

• Why you scale your systems before your sites - and the difference between real scale and a more expensive version of the same grind

• How to keep payer mix front and center so you grow toward health, not just volume

• A one-question gut check to run on your operation this week

“When you scale a health center, you are not adding a site. You are multiplying everything you already are.”

“You didn’t scale the organization. You scaled the number of fires and kept the exact same number of firefighters.”

“The health centers that grow well are the ones that put the infrastructure in before the growth - not the ones scrambling to bolt it on after they’ve already said yes.”

“Build something strong enough to last, and then grow it on purpose - not by accident, not because an opportunity showed up and you panicked.”

• CEO Connect Bootcamp — Jill & Steve Weinman’s program for health center leaders working through scaling and other strategic and financial decisions | www.fqhc-ceo.com

• The Untrained Leader Problem & the Island of Competence — earlier episodes on why developing leaders has to keep pace with the organization (Episodes 27 and 29)

• Past episodes on revenue cycle & technology - the infrastructure that makes real scale possible | www.jillsteeley.com/podcast

• jillsteeley.com - schedule a call to talk through whether you’re ready to scale, or email [email protected]

If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to:

• Leave a rating and review

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode

• Share with a fellow health center leader who needs to hear this message

Have feedback or a topic request? Jill would love to hear from you!

Community Health Collective Podcast

Episode #32

HR1 Could Move 10–25% of Your Patients from Medicaid to Uninsured—Here’s How to Plan for It

Hosted by: Jill Steeley

Episode Overview

HR1-the One Big Beautiful Bill-keeps coming up on the CEO Bootcamp coaching calls, with leaders asking the same question: “What are we going to do about our patients losing their Medicaid?” In this episode, Jill answers it. We’re past speculation and into implementation, and three Medicaid changes are now bearing down on health centers: twice-a-year redeterminations, new work/community engagement requirements, and a narrowing of eligibility for legally present immigrants. Underneath all of it is one financial reality - industry analysts are telling leaders to model a 10–25% drop in their Medicaid population, with the uninsured population growing by the same amount. Jill breaks down each change in plain English and gives you a six-move survival plan so the charity-care hit doesn’t ambush you mid-year.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• What HR1 implementation looks like and which changes are landing in 2026 and 2027
• What the move to six-month redeterminations means for front-office churn and administrative coverage loss
• How the 80-hour-a-month work requirements work—and why most coverage loss will come from reporting burden, not real ineligibility
• Why your Medicaid managed care plans are prohibited from determining work-requirement compliance
• The October 1, 2026 immigrant eligibility cliff: which lawfully present groups lose federally funded Medicaid, and what stays (emergency Medicaid)
• Why a Medicaid-to-uninsured shift hits so hard when Medicaid is 35–40%+ of operating revenue
• Jill’s six-move survival plan—and why cutting your way out makes things worse

Key Takeaways

“The danger here is usually not that people become genuinely ineligible. The danger is the paperwork. Double the redeterminations, and you double the chances for an eligible patient to lose coverage over a piece of mail.”

“Same patient. Same visit. Same cost to deliver the care—with a fraction of the revenue. That’s what a Medicaid-to-uninsured shift actually does to you.”

“Don’t let this surprise you mid-year. Budget charity care on purpose—before it shows up as a variance in front of your board.”

“The health centers that come through this in good shape won’t be the ones that cut the fastest. They’ll be the ones that protected access and planned for the charity care instead of getting ambushed by it.”

Free Resource

Want help with Move 1? Email [email protected] with “HR1 Plan” in the subject line for a simple worksheet to model your Medicaid-to-uninsured exposure and build charity care into your budget—or schedule a call at jillsteeley.com.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Episode #31—the revenue-cycle episode on verifying insurance and recovering leaked revenue (listen first if you haven’t)
• CEO Bootcamp—Jill & Steve Weinman’s program for health center and safety-net leaders navigating strategic and financial decisions
• Vital Interaction—AI-powered patient engagement for branded, multi-language reminders and outreach at scale
• Rural Health Transformation Funding—covered in Episode #19; a potential funding cushion for charity care and capacity
• Free planning worksheet—email “HR1 Plan” to [email protected]

Connect & Subscribe

If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to:

• Leave a rating and review
• Subscribe so you never miss an episode
• Share with a fellow health center leader who needs to hear this message

Have feedback or a topic request? Jill would love to hear from you!

Community Health Collective Podcast

Episode #31

Stop Blaming Billing: The Real Reason Revenue Is Slipping Away

Hosted by: Jill Steeley

Most leaders think of the revenue cycle as billing and collections - the part where you can see the money, or watch it fail to show up. But by the time a claim reaches your billing office, the win or the loss has usually already been decided. In this episode, Jill Steeley reframes where the revenue cycle actually begins: not in the billing office and not with a claim, but the moment a patient fills out their paperwork - and every single time they check in. She walks through the full cycle in plain English, explains why the front desk is the link that breaks most often, shares a sobering story about what a single unconfirmed phone number cost one health center, and leaves you with five low-cost things you can take to your team this week.

• Why most leaders only pay attention to the last 20% of their revenue cycle — and what they’re missing

• The three stages of the revenue cycle in plain English: the front end, the middle, and the back end

• Why those three stages are one connected chain, not separate departments that hand off to each other

• Why the weakest link is usually the front desk — and why no outside revenue cycle contractor can fix that part for you

• How preventable registration and eligibility errors (a transposed member ID, a termed plan, a wrong date of birth) become denials 45 days later

• The true cost of a two-second check-in mistake: staff time at every step, money aging in AR, and claims written off past timely filing

• A real story of how a single unconfirmed phone number turned into a tragedy — and an FTCA claim

• The wrong way and the right way to confirm a patient’s information at check-in

• Five concrete, low-cost ways to strengthen your revenue cycle this week

• How to answer the “my front desk is already slammed” objection — and why that bottleneck is a revenue question, not just an operations one

“Your revenue cycle does not start with a bill — it starts at the front desk.”

“By the time a claim hits your billing office, the outcome of that claim has usually already been decided.”

“Garbage in, garbage out. If the information that goes in at the front desk is wrong, no amount of skill on the billing team is going to save that claim.”

“A two-second mistake at check-in can become a permanent loss for the health center.”

“Your billing team can be excellent, and you can still be bleeding revenue — because the problem was created long before the claim ever reached them.”

• RetroCAID (with Howard Archer) - Software that combs 365 days of your claims against state Medicaid to recover revenue you didn’t know you were owed. No EHR integration, no upfront cost, and they only get paid if you do. Listen to the full episode: $9K to $40K Monthly: How One Software Automatically Recovers Hidden Revenue

• CEO Bootcamp — Jill & Steve Weinman’s program for health center leaders navigating strategic and financial decisions, where revenue cycle is a recurring topic. www.fqhc-ceo.com

• Work with Jill — Email [email protected] or schedule a call at jillsteeley.com to talk through where your revenue cycle is leaking.

If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to:

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode

• Leave a rating and review

• Share with a fellow health center leader who needs to hear this message

Have feedback or a topic request? Jill would love to hear from you!

COO vs. Clinic Manager: How to Know Which One Your Health Center Actually Needs

Hosted by: Brent Stutzman, TheraSaaS Podcast | Guest: Jill Steeley, FQHC Consultant & Executive Coach

――――――――――――――――――――

Episode Overview

In this crossover episode, Jill joins Brent Stutzman on the TheraSaaS podcast for a practical conversation about one of the most consequential growing-pain decisions a practice or health center faces: do you need a clinic manager or a chief operating officer? Drawing on her own experience inheriting a clinic-manager-run health center as a brand-new CEO, Jill unpacks the real difference between the two roles, the warning signs that you’ve outgrown day-to-day firefighting, the true cost of the wrong hire, and why a fractional COO can be the lowest-risk way to test the water.

――――――――――――――――――――

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• The real difference between a clinic manager and a COO—and why conflating them keeps leaders stuck in the weeds

• Why promoting your best clinician into a management role so often backfires

• How to diagnose your actual pain points before you write a single job description

• The “you might need a COO if…” warning signs: staff turnover, operational chaos, stalled patient growth, and no systems

• Why the wrong hire at this level is so expensive—emotionally and financially

• What to actually look for in a COO, and how to vet for outcomes and culture fit, not just a clean reference check

• How a fractional COO works—and why it’s a scalable, lower-risk way to get started

• Why “even imperfect action is action” when burnout is the real symptom

――――――――――――――――――――

Key Takeaways

“Culture eats strategy for lunch any time of the day.”

“Even imperfect action is action.”

“Your burnout is a big symptom of doing everything and not being willing to give up some of that control.”

――――――――――――――――――――

Mentioned in This Episode

• CEO Connect Bootcamp — Jill’s program for health center and practice leaders on attracting patients, building systems, and leading strategically

• Healthcare Leadership Style Quiz — Jill’s free quiz to identify your leadership pattern | jillsteeley.com/leadershipquiz

• Community Health Collective episode on fractional executives

• jillsteeley.com — Schedule a call or find free resources | [email protected]

――――――――――――――――――――

Connect & Subscribe

If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to:

• Leave a rating and review

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode

• Share with a fellow health center leader who needs to hear this message

Have feedback or a topic request? Jill would love to hear from you!

Community Health Collective Podcast

Episode #29

Title: Ok, I See the Problem. Now What?

Hosted by: Jill Steeley

――――――――――――――――――――

Episode Overview

Two weeks ago on Episode 27, Jill named what she calls the untrained leader problem - the pattern in healthcare of promoting strong clinicians and operators into leadership roles without ever training them to actually lead. Since then, the question she's been getting most is, "Okay, I see it. Now what?" In this episode, Jill answers that directly. She names why so many leaders freeze between awareness and action, then walks through a three-step path forward: know yourself, build the specific skills that match your gaps, and - when you're ready - transform your full leadership team together. This is a practical, no-overwhelm episode for leaders who don't want to stay stuck in seeing without ever moving to the doing.

――――――――――――――――――――

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why awareness without action becomes its own kind of suffering—and how to break out of it

• The three reasons leaders freeze between knowing and doing: overwhelm, uncertainty about scope, and the false dichotomy of "go huge or do nothing"

• Why the first move in transforming your team isn't actually about your team—it's about you

• How your own leadership patterns (strengths, blind spots, defaults) quietly become the template your team imitates

• Why generic, corporate leadership training rarely transforms healthcare leaders—and what to do instead

• The bottleneck that develops when an individual leader grows but the rest of the leadership culture doesn't

• Three predictable outcomes for the leader who becomes an "island of competence" in an untransformed organization

• Jill's three-step path: know yourself, build specific skills for your specific gaps, then transform the team together

――――――――――――――――――――

Key Takeaways

"Awareness without action becomes its own kind of suffering. Once you see the untrained leader problem in your organization, you can't unsee it."

"You cannot lead others through a transformation you haven't started yourself."

"The first move doesn't have to be huge. It just has to be in the right direction."

"Individual leadership development without team leadership development creates an island of competence in an organization that hasn't transformed around you."

――――――――――――――――――――

Mentioned in This Episode

• Episode 27 — "The Untrained Leader Problem" — the prequel to this episode; listen first if you haven't

• Leadership Style Quiz — Jill's free 2–5 minute quiz to identify your leadership archetype and the skills most likely to move the needle for you (jillsteeley.com/leadershipquiz)

• Leadership Academy Masterclasses — targeted courses for healthcare leaders including Time Management for Busy Leaders, People-First Leadership, Mastering Candid Conversations, Maximum Output Minimum Effort, Mastering Recruitment and Retention, Designing and Building Strong Teams, Leading Teams Through Change, and C-Suite Ready (jillsteeley.com/leadership)

• Full Leadership Team Development Program — Jill's program for organizations ready to transform their leadership culture as a team: monthly masterclasses, twice-monthly group coaching, and one-on-one coaching slots. Schedule a call here.

――――――――――――――――――――

Connect & Subscribe

If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to:

• Leave a rating and review

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode

• Share with a fellow health center leader who needs to hear this message

Have feedback or a topic request? Jill would love to hear from you! [email protected]

Section 504 & ADA Compliance: What Every Health Center Leader Needs to Do Before the Deadline

Hosted by: Jill Steeley | Guests: Steve Weinman, FQHC Associates and Jen Garces de Marcilla, FQHC Associates

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act has always required organizations receiving federal funding to provide equal access to people with disabilities. The May 2024 HHS final rule made it explicit: digital accessibility is part of that obligation, and FQHCs are squarely in scope. With the compliance deadline extended by one year to May 2026, health centers have a real window to act—but most leaders aren’t yet aware of what the rule requires, where the litigation risk is greatest, or what it actually takes to demonstrate good-faith effort. In this episode, Jill is joined by Steve Weinman and Jen Garces de Marcilla, both of FQHC Associates, to break down what the rule actually covers, what NOT to do, and why digital accessibility is one of the clearest patient experience opportunities health center leaders are going to get this year.

Nothing in this episode constitutes legal advice. Accessibility compliance is an evolving area. The goal of this conversation is to help health center leaders understand the rule, reduce barriers for their patients, and demonstrate documented, good-faith effort toward compliance.

• What Section 504 actually requires now that digital accessibility is explicitly in scope

• The new compliance deadline (May 2026)—and why “I have a year” is the wrong mental model

• The specific digital surfaces this rule covers: websites, patient portals, online scheduling, mobile apps, kiosks, PDFs, EHRs, and embedded third-party tools

• How AI-powered “secret shoppers” are scanning websites for noncompliance—and why even small health centers are exposed

• Why accessibility widgets and overlays are NOT a compliance solution (and may make things worse)

• The most common, lowest-cost, highest-impact fixes: alt text, color contrast, captions, keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, and accessible PDFs

• Why “we’ve never had a complaint” is not a defense

• What “good-faith effort” actually looks like—especially when your EHR vendor isn’t compliant

• How to handle vendor contracts and renewals going forward

• The patient experience angle most leaders are missing—and how accessibility supports transformational, not transactional, care

• Why accessibility benefits temporary disabilities and aging patients, not just permanent disabilities

• Where the budget realistically comes from—and why a properly optimized website pays for itself

“It’s not just a compliance issue. It’s not even just a legal issue. It is a patient experience issue as well. Patients are looking for more of a transformational healthcare experience now rather than a transactional one.”

— Jill Steeley

“By making things accessible for people who might have disabilities, you’re actually making them more accessible for everyone. It’s not necessarily just for people that have permanent disabilities.”

— Jen Garces de Marcilla

“If you do it right, it pays for itself, because if you’re not running at peak efficiency, you are hemorrhaging visits and patients.”

— Steve Weinman

To request a free 504 Toolkit, email jill@jillsteeley.com with “504 toolkit” in the subject line.

• FQHC Associates — Steve and Jen’s firm, available for accessibility audits and consulting at fqhc.org

• Steve Weinman direct contact: [email protected]

• CEO Bootcamp — Jill and Steve’s program for FQHC leaders (www.fqhc-ceo.com)

• Leadership Academy — Jill’s online masterclasses (www.jillsteeley.com/leadership)

If this episode was valuable to you, please:

• Leave a rating and review

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode

• Share with a fellow health center leader who needs to hear this

Have a topic request or feedback? Jill would love to hear from you.

In this episode, Jill tackles what she calls the single biggest unaddressed crisis in healthcare workforce sustainability right now — the untrained leader problem. Healthcare is one of the only industries that consistently promotes people into leadership positions based on their technical skills, then expects them to figure out the leadership skills on their own. The result? Brilliant clinicians who are drowning in roles they were never trained for, and entire teams paying the price for a gap nobody is closing.

Jill shares the story of a private coaching client — a nurse promoted into a Clinic Director role who was working sixty-hour weeks, losing staff, and starting to wonder if she was cut out for leadership at all. Six months of structured leadership development later, the picture had completely transformed. The skills are teachable. But only if we decide to teach them.

If you're a CEO, executive director, medical director, or anyone responsible for developing leaders in a healthcare organization, this episode names what most people aren't naming out loud — and offers a clear path forward.

In this episode:

• Why healthcare promotes brilliantly and develops terribly — and what it's costing all of us
• The question every leader should ask themselves: How did you actually learn to lead?
• The pattern of the clinician-turned-leader, and why "she'll figure it out" isn't a strategy
• The identity shift every clinical leader has to make to stop drowning
• The story of one coaching client's six-month transformation from burnout to sustainable leadership
• Why leadership development in healthcare isn't separate from the mission — it IS the mission
• Four practical things every health center should do to develop their leaders before crisis hits

Statistics cited in this episode:

• 57% of employees have left a job specifically because of their manager (DDI Leadership Research)
• 58% of employees cite their manager's management style as the primary reason they quit a job, up from 37% just eight years earlier (BambooHR, 2025)
• 90% of employees say their boss influenced their decision to leave their last job (BambooHR, 2025)
• 50% of employees have left a job at some point in their career "to get away from their manager to improve their overall life" (Gallup, study of over 7,000 adults)
• The average cost to replace a single staff RN is now $60,000 (NSI National Health Care Retention Report, 2026)
• Hospitals are losing an average of $5.2 million per year to nurse turnover alone (NSI, 2026)
• National RN turnover rate is 17.6%; behavioral health is over 22% (NSI, 2026)
• Hospitals with high nurse turnover see a 7% increase in patient falls, a 12% rise in medication errors, and a 15% decline in patient satisfaction scores
• 35–54% of the US nursing and physician workforce reports symptoms of burnout

Resources mentioned:

• Jill's Leadership Academy — comprehensive leadership program for healthcare leaders (doors opening soon)
• The CEO Connect Bootcamp — Jill's twice-yearly executive program co-led with Steve Weinman
• Jill's Healthcare Leadership Style Quiz — free assessment to identify your leadership style and give you actionable next steps to develop your leadership skills

Connect with Jill:

• Website: www.jillsteeley.com
• Leadership Masterclasses: www.jillsteeley.com/leadership
• Schedule a conversation (link to Jill’s calendar)
• Email: [email protected]

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with another healthcare leader who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a rating and review — it helps us reach more healthcare leaders who are doing this hard work.

The Community Health Collective Podcast — real, honest conversations about what it actually takes to lead in healthcare.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why most "patient appreciation" events in health centers are actually marketing events in disguise
• The critical difference between referral-source thank-yous (B2B) and patient-facing appreciation gestures
• Why healthcare runs on trust — and how no-strings-attached appreciation builds it faster than almost anything else
• Small-budget ideas: birthday cards from providers, handwritten milestone cards, monthly coffee mornings
• Medium-budget ideas: community BBQs, family movie nights, skating or bowling nights
• Bigger ideas: holiday meal kits, new-parent care packages, patient longevity recognition
• How to address the "we can't afford this" objection — including funding sources most leaders aren't using
• A 5-step framework for rolling out a patient appreciation effort without it dying in a leadership meeting
• Why measuring this with marketing metrics will kill it — and what to ask instead

Key Takeaway

"Loyalty is built through genuine appreciation, not just clinical excellence. Your clinical care is the price of admission — but the thing that turns a patient into a loyal patient is the feeling that you actually see them."

Connect with Jill

Email: [email protected]

Schedule a call: jillsteeley.com

If this episode resonated, please:

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode
• Leave a rating and review
• Share with a fellow health center leader who needs to hear this