athenista spotlight: Meet Melissa Lukowski
She’s traveled throughout South America and worked on a spacecraft that flew to Saturn. Now, she manages athenahealth’s very down-to-earth Payer Outreach Program. Meet Melissa Lukowski, athenahealth’s Director of Payer Outreach.
athenaPulse: Tell us about your position at athenahealth.
Melissa Lukowski: I’ve been with athenahealth since 2001 in a variety of roles. Now I’m the Director Payer Outreach. We’ve had a Payer Outreach program since day one, but my role adds a new dimension. I work with our payer partners to help them operationally and strategically improve in a number of different areas. We use PayerView as a framework to inform our initiatives [see PayerView article this issue].
aP: How closely do you work with payers?
ML: It depends on the payer. If it’s a high performing payer, with a strong ranking in PayerView, we might work with them on defining strategically how to take it to the next level. If it’s a lower-performing payer, we might work with them on more basic operational issues: how we can submit electronic claims or lower denial rates.
aP: What do you do in a typical day?
ML: I’m external-facing, serving as a liaison to our payer partners. I go to a lot of meetings and have conversations with payer executives. I also work closely with our Internal Operations team. I am the escalation point for any issues that need extra attention, such as problems with a particular claim. I have lots of balls in the air. It’s exciting.
aP: I hear you have quite a resume. How did you get involved with designing panels for the space shuttle?
ML: I think this doubles as my “most embarrassing moment” at athenahealth. I went to Harvard Business School with Jonathan Bush. When I joined the company, he would introduce me and say things that sounded much better than they really were! The reality is that I was in engineering for many years, and worked on the last, large spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory before budgets got much smaller. It flew to Saturn.
aP: Best vacation you ever took?
ML: After business school, about 15 of us traveled all around South America for a month. I am a native Spanish speaker, and it was wonderful to be in all those different countries. We visited Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Columbia – it was amazing the different environments we came across, from desert to beaches, even just within Brazil.
aP: Your favorite “athenahealth moment?”
ML: Every year, athenahealth senior management goes to this place on Thompson Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. And every year, everyone complains about how rough it is – the bathrooms are disgusting, there’s no air conditioning, the mosquitoes are awful. But every year we manage to get so much done – we bond, and we have lots of memorable moments.
aP: How do you unwind after work?
ML: I spend time with my son, who is almost two. It’s amazing he’s that old already!
