Executive Director of Connected Care

SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium•Juneau, AK

50d

About The Position

The Executive Director of Connected Care is a newly created leadership role within the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC). This high-impact position is responsible for leading and overseeing all facets of patient access across the ambulatory enterprise, while collaborating with a broad range of operational and strategic stakeholders throughout the organization. The Executive Director will have a wide span of control, with accountability for all aspects of patient access. This includes direct oversight of patient support center operations, referral management (scheduling, communication), provider and resource template management, and the execution of consumer-driven models of care. In this role, the Executive Director will maintain strong partnerships with clinical operations, technology, and revenue cycle leaders, establishing and managing bilateral service level agreements and shared operating standards across these functions. The position reports directly to the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of SEARHC and includes multiple matrixed reporting relationships. This role is intentionally designed for a senior working leader. SEARHC needs someone who can define the enterprise Connected Care and ambulatory access vision, build the roadmap to get there, and help execute the work in a lean, relationship-driven environment. The successful candidate will bring strategic judgment to set the direction, operational experience to know what it will take, and a hands-on orientation to help teams build workflows, solve problems, and sustain progress. Since Connected Care will affect how work is designed, staffed, governed, and experienced across the ambulatory enterprise, this leader must be highly effective at bringing people along. Success will depend on the ability to engage stakeholders early, develop solutions with meaningful input from the people closest to the work, communicate the reason for change, and build enough trust that leaders and teams are willing to adopt new ways of working. SEARHC is a non-profit health consortium which serves the health interests of the residents of Southeast Alaska. We see our employees as our strongest assets. It is our priority to further their development and our organization by aiding in their professional advancement. Working at SEARHC is more than a job, it’s a fulfilling career. We offer generous benefits, including retirement, paid time off, paid parental leave, health insurance, dental, and vision benefits, life insurance and long and short-term disability, and more.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in healthcare administration, business, or a related field; master’s degree preferred.
Training or experience in process improvement and Lean/Six Sigma. Certification preferred.
Minimum ten (10) years of executive experience in health system operations and/or performance improvement.
Minimum five (5) years of executive experience in a patient access or ambulatory leadership rol
Demonstrated experience leading technology-enabled operational change in ambulatory access, scheduling, referral management, contact center, digital front door, patient communications, or related healthcare operations.
Strong working knowledge of ambulatory clinic operations, including provider template management, appointment scheduling, referral workflows, care team handoffs, patient communication, and access performance management.
Experience translating operational needs into technology requirements, implementation plans, workflow designs, reporting needs, and adoption strategies.
Demonstrated ability to lead across multiple levels of detail, from enterprise strategy and executive decision-making to frontline workflow design and issue resolution.
Knowledge of Tribal health programs
Healthcare operating systems and access to care
Process improvement
Skills in Oral and written communication
People management
Data analysis
Ability to Develop strategies that drive measurable results, cultural transformation, and operational excellence.
Effectively communicate and motivate people
Work collaboratively and effectively with multi-disciplinary, cross-functional teams, and with executives, providers, and staff at all levels
Turn ambiguity into structure without over-engineering the work.

Nice To Haves

Preferred experience with the Meditech EHR platform
Preferred experience with one or more telephony and/or Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms (e.g., WebEx, Zoom Contact Center, Genesys).

Responsibilities

Operates as both a strategic leader and hands-on builder, moving fluidly between enterprise access design, implementation planning, stakeholder alignment, and practical execution support.
Serves as an internal subject matter expert on patient access strategy, operations, and technology across related domains such as scheduling, schedule template management, referral management, patient communications (omnichannel strategy), and care coordination.
Participates in annual and periodic strategic planning for the organization while leading and maintaining an annual enterprise access performance plan. This includes providing global direction for access strategy by developing short- and long-term patient access performance targets while identifying and executing on mission-critical programmatic needs and projects.
Develops the long-term Connected Care and ambulatory access roadmap in partnership with key stakeholders, including clinical operations leaders, providers, community leaders, technology, revenue cycle, finance, and frontline teams.
Translates shared input into a practical implementation plan that defines sequencing, resources, governance, workflows, staffing implications, technology dependencies, and performance expectations.
Sponsors administrative aspects of the governance model (Consortium Access Governance Group) related to patient scheduling, care coordination, and referral management; develops operating principles and ensures translation of operating principles to workflows and ongoing monitoring.
Articulates and executes initiatives to improve ambulatory access operations, with a focus on capacity, scheduling, patient throughput, and patient digital self-service.
Partners with IT, clinical operations, revenue cycle, and frontline users to define technology-enabled workflows that are operationally sound, patient-centered, and realistic for local teams to adopt.
Serves as the operational translator between business needs and technology design, ensuring that EHR, telephony, CCaaS, referral management, template, digital access, and reporting decisions support the Connected Care model.
Brings a working knowledge of ambulatory clinic operations to access design, including provider capacity, appointment availability, template design, referral flow, front desk workflows, patient communications, care team handoffs, and escalation pathways.
Partners with SEARHC and department leadership to educate and train on the access design and change processes.
Effectively communicates the “why” of the change to providers and team members.
Engages providers as partners in the design of appropriate appointment availability and access to provider level care, ensuring the organization’s available appointment volume consistently meets the needs of patients.
Serves as the senior executive sponsor for the Patient Support Center (centralized scheduling), enabling programmatic leadership to identify scheduling optimization opportunities, drive performance standards across the supported lines of business, and improve patient experience in the care coordination lifecycle.
Collaborates with finance and clinical operations leadership to maintain a comprehensive revenue cycle performance plan, with primary accountability to maintain effective front-line and telephonic front-end revenue cycle performance through effective process design, staff training, and performance metrics.
Partners with IT to define operational requirements, workflow design, build priorities, testing needs, reporting expectations, and adoption plans for systems that support scheduling, referral management, provider templates, patient communications, contact center operations, and digital access.
Ensures technology decisions are tied to the Connected Care operating model and grounded in the realities of clinic operations; audits resource and provider template design, and work queue volumes.
Monitors key performance indicators related to availability of care and resource/provider optimization of clinical effort; advises SEARHC and department program leadership to remediate non-performance to metric standards; maintains budget performance for areas of direct responsibility.
Aligns programmatic efforts to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of business practices and partnering with enterprise leaders (and their teams) to support a patient-first culture