By Amanda Eisel
Amanda Eisel has focused the last 20 years of her career at the intersection of healthcare and technology. She has been deeply involved creating and scaling multiple growth technology companies including Waystar, Applied Systems and Viewpoint. Amanda has been a member of the Zelis team since 2019, playing a leadership role across Zelis’ growth, operational and talent strategies. Amanda started her career at McKinsey & Company, where she spent nearly a decade advising consumer companies. Prior to Zelis, Amanda was an Operating Partner at Bain Capital focused on technology and healthcare IT companies.
Hi, I’m Amanda, the newbie CEO of Zelis. I’m starting a blog series on our new Zelis website which we launched a couple of months ago with our updated mission and brand.
I’m starting this blog to keep our clients, future clients, partners and industry friends in the know about Zelis and what we’re doing. Right now we’re talking a lot about how to get the pain out of healthcare payments, I’ll come back to that later.
Firstly, I wanted to let you know a bit about me and why I’ve stepped into this (great!) role at Zelis. I spent considerable time deciding to leave a job I loved, and that decision came down to a few things.
The first is that Zelis is a company I really believe in. Zelis has an important and timely purpose as we play our part in harmonizing the healthcare ecosystem in our pursuit to price, explain, and pay for healthcare on behalf of payers and their members.
The second reason is the Zelis team. In many ways that reason is more important than the first – but in combination it’s unstoppable. The team includes some of the most impressive executives I’ve had a chance to work with. Having worked with Zelis as part of my role at Bain Capital, I had the unique pleasure of being able to step into a new role, look across the table and see a team that I helped shape – they are a very passionate team! I was also fortunate to work closely with many of our founders over the last two years – I deeply respect them and am grateful to have them as my trusted advisors.
And the third reason? As a mom to three small kids, being a parent is another big part of the reason that I am here today. As a member, a parent, a patient, I know the opportunity in front of us – the difference we can make. The last (nearly) two years has certainly made most of us really think differently about healthcare.
With each passing day, it makes complete sense that I’ve landed here in this job. As a kid, I was always questioning and investigating. As an adult, that translates into digging into business challenges, but with an eye toward learning more about the people inside and around the business. I know that energized groups of humans focused on a problem can deliver some pretty powerful solutions.
I think it is a ton of fun to invest deeply in technology to solve hard problems, and I think healthcare has a lot of hard problems that can be solved with technology.
Looking at those problems has led our team to spend time reflecting on Zelis’ purpose, which is to price, pay and explain healthcare. And we have added a new tagline that reflects this commitment: Pay for Care, with Care.
This commitment is also reflected in our mission and vision statement:
In an industry as complex as healthcare, it requires everything we do to pay for care, with care. We think about healthcare payments as a complicated web of interactions between payers, providers, and members. It’s everything involved from making a “pain” into a “payment.” It includes optimized networks, transparency and navigation tools, and pricing solutions… all in service of making and explaining a payment.
As we know, healthcare payments are more complex than in any other industry, which is our reason for being.
Zelis wants to bring harmony to the healthcare payments process. We intend to bring innovative and modern solutions that payers, providers and members can trust, thereby making healthcare more harmonious.
Whether it’s regulatory changes such as the No Surprises Act or the changing requirements of consumers, the leadership team and I know now is the time to double-down on building and adding capabilities for our clients and partners. These changes in our industry excite and motivate us to see the opportunities that will make the entire system work better.
With the industry working together, we are confident in our pursuit to price, explain, and pay for healthcare — because affordable and transparent care is good and harmonious for all.
If you have a chance please read my recent interview with Luke Kervin of Authority Magazine. As part of Luke’s series 5 Things We Must Do To Improve the US Healthcare System, he asked me to share the five things I think we need to do.
Until next time, stay well and thanks for stopping by to read my first blog!
