Even though Richard Queen has spent almost all of his life serving in healthcare operations,
he started his career as a general accountant working in manufacturing. Since the year 2008
he’s been working in the healthcare sector in a variety of roles, starting as a Budget Analyst
for King’s Daughters Medical Centre in Kentucky. He got several positions here, eventually
becoming the Director of Finance and Business Intelligence, where he was in charge of
finding and implementing new business opportunities, including provider practice
acquisitions.
This made him take his next step: becoming the Chief Financial Officer for
Huntington Internal Medicine Group (HIMG), which is a large multi-specialty
independent medical group functioning in Huntington, West Virginia. According to
Queen, it was this job that made him choose his current career path, designing the
prototype of the software he’s now implemented at Memorial Health. “We began
entering risk-based contracts with our payers,” he says. “We stood up a Medicare
ACO from scratch, became fully capitated with one of our payers, and entered into
many value-based contracts. I wrote to a system asking for help with those
contracts.”
This resulted in HIMG’s primary care revenue growth 10 per cent every year, and
their preventative care increased from 15 to 80 percent. “Filling those care gaps got
us the largest gain sharing checks from our payers that we had received, all while
offering first class patient care,” he says.
Later Queen decided to completely redesign the software for it to be enterprise
scalable; today it is a commercially available product with DignifiHealth, called
DignifiEngage, and is also the intelligence backbone of an ecosystem of virtual
healthcare technologies.
After spending a couple of years as the VP of Data Science at Medical Practice
Management Solutions in Huntington, he joined Memorial Health System in April
“They were interested in what my software could do,” he explains. “They had
tried population health initiatives before and didn’t find the success they wanted. So I
came to Memorial to stand up a custom version of the software I’d created, and then
drive initiatives across the organization from a population health and quality-based
standpoint.”
Being a leader, he doesn’t micromanage, instead, he prefers to look for self-starters
and train them for leadership roles. “I like to think at a higher level, setting up the
vision, but then I like to get my hands dirty, working alongside anybody else,
punching out the code that takes us where we are needed to go.”