Transcript
Molly Dwyer (00:00) hello? Hi, Ashlynn. How are you? I’m good. How are you? I’m doing well. Where are you calling in from? I,
Ashlynn Johnson (00:07) am calling in from New York actually, but I’m typically based out of Atlanta. I’m just traveling this week.
Molly Dwyer (00:13) Oh, nice. Are you traveling for work?
Ashlynn Johnson (00:15) No, I, well, when I come here, I do visit the office because headway’s based out of New York, but I am traveling because I have a few friends that are in shows in theater this week. So, coming to the sport, oh, my gosh. And I have a concert to go to next week. So mostly fun type stuff.
Molly Dwyer (00:33) Yes, that is so fun. It’s very impressive friends that you have that are in shows and performances. Yeah.
Ashlynn Johnson (00:40) Super talented. I am a happy audience member because I don’t have any of those talents.
Molly Dwyer (00:47) And it’s nice. You have an office in New York that you can like work out of and pop into and see some folks.
Ashlynn Johnson (00:53) Yeah, and like finally interact with people instead of zoom all the time. Yeah, it’s nice.
Molly Dwyer (00:59) It’s nice. Where are.
Ashlynn Johnson (01:00) you calling from?
Molly Dwyer (01:01) I’m in the Boston area. So east coast as well. And we are fully remote. So I totally get it like I’m on zoom all day.
Ashlynn Johnson (01:10) Yeah, it.
Molly Dwyer (01:12) Is always nice to be able to catch up with people in person and then chase things up. Otherwise, it’s just computer screens.
Ashlynn Johnson (01:20) Yes, for sure. I don’t know. I don’t remember who I was talking to and I was saying, I feel like I’m always constantly looking at a screen during the day and on zoom. And sometimes it’s just nice to go and like have a conversation with someone in person and be able to talk things through. Oh,
Molly Dwyer (01:35) my gosh, a 1,000 percent. It’s like that one to one connection that you can never get with technology.
Ashlynn Johnson (01:42) Yeah, for sure.
Molly Dwyer (01:44) Yeah. Well, that’s amazing. How long have you been with headway? Yeah.
Ashlynn Johnson (01:49) It’s been a little over a year. It was a year in February, so, not like a little bit long, but in headway years, it’s like not that long.
Ashlynn Johnson (01:59) There’s times where I feel new sometimes and there’s times where I feel like a veteran, but yeah. So, I did my one year last month and it’s been great, learned quite a bit. Do a little bit of everything on the team. Yeah, it’s been pretty cool. I,
Molly Dwyer (02:14) would love to learn a little bit more about your role within the company just as I’m kind of getting to speed on the partnership.
Ashlynn Johnson (02:20) Yeah, yeah, sure. So, I, we have our clinical team right before I started last year, we had one like general clinical team and we split it out into clinical operations and clinical strategy. So our clinical strategy team is equates… to our clinical leadership essentially. So we have our CMO, Neha, and.
Molly Dwyer (02:41) I worked with Neha at modern health. Yeah. Oh, so cool. I still need to reach out but she’s wonderful. Yeah.
Ashlynn Johnson (02:47) Yes, she is amazing. I’m so happy to have.
Molly Dwyer (02:50) her on board. You guys are lucky. She’s a rock star.
Ashlynn Johnson (02:52) Yeah, she’s so great. And so we have her leading the way, and then we have our, we have four, five medical directors, and then a therapist, a bunch of different clinicians on the clinical strategy team. And actually, I’m the only non clinician on the clinical strategy team. And my role is to kind of be like a embedded like ops type person doing like admin type things, building trackers for the team, planning onsites, a little bit of like chief of staff Esque, but also embedded in a lot of the different work streams that they’re working on. Yeah, yeah. But, I have a lot of clinical experience. I’ve worked in several different hospitals as a, in behavioral health and hands on… patient safety and things like that. So I’m able to kind of take that knowledge and bring it here, but also use my operations type knowledge just to support the team and everything that they do. Oh, so.
Molly Dwyer (03:56) Interesting. It sounds like the perfect mix of, you know, your experiences and like what, your passions are. Yeah.
Ashlynn Johnson (04:04) Yeah, it’s a good mix. This role I was, I had applied to a few different things that had way over the years and nothing ever worked out. And then this role came up and I was like, okay, this sounds pretty perfect. And then this is the one that I ended up getting. So it worked out but I do, I enjoy it. I learned so much. It’s really nice being involved with and being in all of these conversations with such intelligent people and seeing how all of the decisions and everything happen and being able to support in a way where we can like gather metrics and track data and things like that. I joke and I always say I’m like the person behind the scenes behind the computer. So yeah, I like it a lot. And our medical, two of our medical directors are also our PC owners, the professional corporation. So that’s dr Jeff gold, and then dr Carrie krall, and they’re the ones that are using medallion for the most part right now to manage all of their licensure, so that we can in turn make sure our PCS that headway is using are kept up to date and compliance wise. Yeah.
Molly Dwyer (05:11) Okay. I was wondering that because… from the medallion partnership, it sounds like we are supporting your clinical strategy slash executive doctor staff, but not necessarily your provider network and clinicians, right? Yes. And do you know, do you have more insight into like how that setup came to be? Or is it just always been that way? I, I’m.
Ashlynn Johnson (05:43) not familiar with how it got set. Up. This was something that when I first started at headway last year, actually this whole process was with it was living with a different team, our credentialing team. And then at a certain point, it was just handed off to me being that it was like working more closely with our medical directors. So, I don’t have much historical context on the why and the people that were kind of behind it are no longer at headway. So I wish I had more insight more context but it was kind of like a handoff of like this is what we’re using and just kind of running with it.
Molly Dwyer (06:20) Okay. No, that’s really helpful and interesting. I, there’s like other clients that are similar set up, but I will say like that’s pretty untypical where we’re only working with a very small subset of providers, so, or executive staff. And so, I’m always curious to just kind of better understand like from a credentialing standpoint, where that team sits and like how you and that team are aligned on some of the priorities that you’re working on or are they completely separate and siloed, like that’s? Kind of what I’m curious about.
Ashlynn Johnson (06:56) Yeah. So our provider network is like completely with a different team managed with a different team. And right now, medallion is used strictly just for our medical directors, maintaining all of their licenses for the professional corporations?
Molly Dwyer (07:11) Got it. And do they have any specific like priorities or areas that we should be aware of for the licenses that we are managing for those providers this year?
Ashlynn Johnson (07:23) No specific priorities. I think the biggest thing that medallion is really helpful for is just because it’s so many licenses for each of them. I think, I know Carrie has, I think he’s licensed in almost all 50 states if not all 50 states. So just supporting with like the tracking piece and like having a team that’s able to like work on those applications and kind of manage everything. So I think it’s more of a help like a taking a lift off of them and being able to use your team to kind of support with all of that… renewals and applications, collecting everything and then having me as the in between, like actually managing in medallion and so that way I can just go to them and say this is what’s happening. These are all the updates. This is what you need to do. And then, yeah.
Molly Dwyer (08:16) Makes it much easier.
Ashlynn Johnson (08:18) Yes. Because they are, their schedules are insane and they do so much. So, I have it as support as best I can and, you guys make it a lot easier because I think if we weren’t using medallion, this would also be something I’d be doing manually too. Oh.
Molly Dwyer (08:34) No. Oh no.
Ashlynn Johnson (08:35) So, luckily, you don’t have to worry about that. Yeah, yeah.
Molly Dwyer (08:38) I mean, I’m excited about the continued partnership. So, thank you for your help with the renewal process and everything. Is there anything that like any gaps or any areas that we could be supporting in a better way or just any feedback I can share with the team? Yeah, not.
Ashlynn Johnson (08:56) Right now, I know last around last summer, we were having some issues with one of our other medical directors, dr Benson, and she right now she’s not one of the PC owners and we were going to start the process of like getting her license in different states. But I think there were a couple of issues where some of her information or the documents were sent off without her reviewing at first like there was a couple of mix ups and we had to, we had a couple of email exchanges with, I believe the CEO. I don’t remember who it was, but we were, right now, we’re pausing with her licensure period. So we’re not worrying about it right now. So I don’t know if you’re in our account a lot, but you might see that there’s a lot of tasks that are specific to Nicole Benson, but we’re pausing all of her stuff completely just to make sure we’re aligned internally before we move forward. But… otherwise, I don’t have any specific call outs. I’m able to, it’s nice to be able to like use the chat feature to quickly like getting feedback or making changes and stuff to applications before they get submitted. But yeah, I don’t think I have anything specific right now.
Molly Dwyer (10:20) Okay. Well, I just wanted to make the connection. So, you know who I am and like, yeah, put a face to a name if you do need anything. You know, support function definitely like first line of response, but please don’t hesitate to reach out to me as well.
Molly Dwyer (10:37) And definitely, you know, would love to, at some point get connected to the credentialing team. I think we’ve been in conversations with them before. So, is it, how do I pronounce this name?
Ashlynn Johnson (10:51) Is it Ashna, maybe?
Molly Dwyer (10:53) Or I.
Ashlynn Johnson (10:57) don’t think.
Molly Dwyer (10:59) Mehak.
Ashlynn Johnson (10:59) The heck? Yes.
Molly Dwyer (11:01) Okay. Yeah. So we were in conversations with them a few years ago around credentialing. So, trying to pick up those conversations and definitely, we’ll keep you like informed if we do. Just so everyone’s like on the same page and you’re aware from just, you know, overall relationship standpoint.
Ashlynn Johnson (11:19) Yeah, sounds good. I’ll give her a heads up and I, to be honest, I’m not sure what their current workflows are on the credentialing side right now, but I’ll let her know that, the interest is there and either should I have her reach out or just.
Molly Dwyer (11:36) yeah, I had already reached out and, she responded, I think, yeah, we would love to just set up time, understand how the current workflows are going, what they’re currently using. We do definitely have some really exciting updates from medallion in terms of our cvo and some of the clients that we’re supporting like spring health. So it’d be really relevant just to kind of share those updates and learn more about how things are operating over there. But yeah, if, you know, if that connection takes place, I’ll definitely keep you posted as well, just so we’re all on the same page. Yeah.
Ashlynn Johnson (12:07) That sounds great.
Molly Dwyer (12:08) Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Enjoy your time in New York and I hope you enjoy those shows.
Ashlynn Johnson (12:14) Yeah, thank you. How’s the weather in Boston right now? Is it finally?
Molly Dwyer (12:17) Warming up? It is beautiful. I am so happy it has been a brutal winter and spring is springing. Okay?
Ashlynn Johnson (12:24) Good. Well, I’m glad it’s starting to warm up. Hopefully allergies are, I know everybody’s allergies are killing them right now. Yeah. So hopefully that part’s not too bad, but I’m glad it’s warming up. And thank you again for putting this time on. I really appreciate the face to face meeting.
Ashlynn Johnson (12:37) This is great. And yeah, if I ever have any like questions or concerns, I know should I still reach out to like the support email first? Definitely?
Molly Dwyer (12:46) Reach out to support unless it’s something that like you need immediate help with or there’s an escalation or just anything contract related, got it. Please loop me and definitely, I’m here to help out.
Ashlynn Johnson (12:58) Okay, cool. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much.
Molly Dwyer (13:00) Thank you. Have a good rest of your day, you too.
Ashlynn Johnson (13:03) Bye.
Molly Dwyer (13:03) Bye bye.