Written by Iman Abuzeid, MD
We are delighted to welcome Sara Sweat to the Incredible Health team as our new VP of Customer Success.
Sara brings nearly 20 years of experience to her role at Incredible Health, having successfully led sales, performance coaching, and client management teams across Payer, Provider, and Channel Partner segments. Prior to joining our team, she worked for amazing healthcare technology organizations like Change Healthcare and Teladoc Health, where she drove tremendous results:
- Over 700% revenue growth across enterprise clients during her tenure at Teladoc
- Oversaw and led $200M+ in annual revenue from the Account Management division and formed a brand new Account Management Performance Optimization function at Change Healthcare
- Even as an individual contributor, before her last 10 years of people management, Sara drove a $7M increase in gross annual revenue while routinely achieving between 105% – 200% at Change Healthcare
On top of this impact, Sara attained a Masters degree in Counseling and is currently pursuing her executive coaching certification.
We sat down with Sara to learn more about her background and the impact she’s already having at Incredible Health.
What are examples of recent problems Customer Success solved for Incredible Health hospitals?
Many of the hospital recruiters we work with are carrying huge requisition loads, and no matter how much they hire, the need keeps growing. They’re on the front lines, too.
Our process is designed to work in partnership with them – ensuring they have what they need to work creatively within the parameters of their open roles to find top talent their hiring managers otherwise may not have seen.
One of our hospital clients in Texas had multiple open supervisor roles and no internal candidates. By getting specific about the needs, our team updated our matching algorithms and uncovered numerous qualified candidates. The recruiter we worked with was so relieved and shared that they would have had zero candidates to present – if not for our partnership.
A different client was really struggling to get engagement from their internal team on our platform. We created a new training module, engaged the leadership team, and implemented new processes to create transparency into where talent was getting stuck in the hiring process. As a result, they hired six RNs with Incredible Health in 21 days.
We see things our clients sometimes don’t because of our unique vantage point – successfully hiring in multiple markets. By regular monitoring, turning data into insights, and sharing best practices, one of our California-based clients was able to decrease their average time to hire from 46 days to 22 days – all in just two months.
What are the most important things your team does to help customers succeed?
Our customers entrust us with a sacred duty – helping them find the best possible nurses to care for their patients. Through our customer partnerships, we are directly impacting the quality of care in our country. So, it’s not a duty we take lightly.
Clients come to us – not only for the experienced and specialized nursing talent we provide but for the expertise and consultation we offer in optimizing hiring practices.
The Customer Success team helps clients remove barriers to speed: strengthening their hiring funnel, creating unique best practices, and making it intuitive and easy to review and interview highly qualified candidates. As a marketplace, we’re armed with a plethora of data from our platform, and our customer success team packages that into clear and actionable insights. It’s inspiring to watch how quickly and efficiently our clients can achieve their goals when we optimize these processes.
What is the most common (or surprising) piece of advice you give to customers?
By far, the most significant asset a hospital system has when hiring experienced nurses is speed. Our algorithms, talent advocate team, and customer success team members do the work of finding and connecting clients to top talent. Still, speed is only possible in the context of a collaborative and iterative partnership.
My most common piece of advice to customers is to invest the time to build that kind of partnership with us. We’re only as effective as our relationships allow us to be, but together we can be…well…incredible.
What brought you to Incredible Health?
So many things. But, for me, at the end of the day – it’s about the mission.
I’ve been in healthcare technology for most of my career, but I actually got my start as a recruiter. I’ve been there – trying to balance an organization’s urgent and immediate needs with the time it takes to find and vet top talent.
We all owe a debt of gratitude to the nurses and the hospital systems that have been on the front lines of this pandemic for all of us. It feels like the very least I can do – to help our nurses find the right job for them and help hospitals find the right talent for their organizations – so they can continue doing the life-saving work we all so desperately need.
What are your priorities for you and your team in 2022?
Our first core value as a company is customer obsession. And, while that’s everyone’s job at Incredible Health, our Customer Success team is the face of that commitment. So, we’re constantly learning, looking for ways to create value, and being good stewards of the trust our customers place in us.
The most significant change you’ll see in our Customer Success team next year is growth. Our results are resonating with new employers, so we will continue to scale next year to meet the need and maintain our strong customer experience.
Specifically for 2022, you’ll see this team add rigor and enhance our internal processes to strengthen our partnerships with our customers. We are also excited to continue rolling out cutting edge features from our product roadmaps, and features our customers have requested, built by our world-class product and engineering teams. We are always learning and improving.
And, you’ll see us offer more industry trends in our consultation with our clients – helping them see around corners and navigate the ever-changing landscape of nurse hiring.
Have you had an experience with a nurse that made a positive impact on you?
At the end of a painful battle with pancreatic cancer, my mom spent about two months in a skilled nursing facility in hospice. As is often the case during end-of-life transitions, I was my mother’s advocate and practically lived at the hospice center.
It was a challenging and stressful time for our family, but there were a few nurses in particular who made all the difference.
The doctors were great, but it was the nurses that helped make those final months both bearable and meaningful for my mom. They didn’t just administer care, but infused caring into everything they did.
What’s a memorable piece of feedback an Incredible Health customer shared with you?
The most memorable pieces of feedback are always about our partnership. Clients like the ones quoted below have a felt difference in their workload and their enjoyment of recruiting due to the way we partner with them and the results it drives. That’s what motivates us every day.
“I have been recruiting for 30+ years, and I felt like I had seen everything. Incredible Health is so different, you have thought of everything we could need! What you are doing is awesome. Give my kudos to your entire team, especially the folks that built this! We have tried so many things, but this is IT!”
“I sincerely appreciate our partnership. It’s an ABSOLUTE pleasure to work with you, and truly your partnership is contributing to our success. I can’t thank you enough for your time and working with my team surrounding platform questions, candidate engagement, and your insights. The Incredible Health platform is easy to use, my team also finds it to be very user-friendly, AND we’re getting some great candidates.”
What interests are you exploring in your free time?
Mental health advocacy is a vital need in our country and it’s so important to me to be a voice in that discussion. After earning my Master’s degree in counseling almost a decade ago, I’ve had the privilege of being a part of the mental health community in middle Tennessee.
I serve on the Partnership Council of an amazing non-profit counseling agency – The Refuge Center for Counseling – and get to lead the occasional psycho-educational or support group focused on grief and trauma. So, when I’m not at work, you can usually find me tucked away in a corner reading books about epigenetic trauma. That’s totally normal, right?
