Meet the Team: Shannon Sinclair
“Shannon has been a remarkable asset to U.S. HealthTek from day one,” says U.S. HealthTek’s CEO Cristy Reiter. “Her vast experience in different health care sectors, her incredible work ethic, and perhaps most of all, her ability to learn, grow, and take on new challenges in an ever-changing industry have made her a critical part of our team’s success. Plus, clients just enjoy working with her because of her organizational and people skills, and her ability to smoothly reach the organization’s goal.”
Shannon was born in Kansas City, and her family moved to Coweta, OK when she was young. She grew up in the Tulsa suburbs, and was working in the medical field by 2000. She started at the front desk of a primary care office and moved into managing the MRI/CAT services at Insight Imaging Center in Tulsa. She quickly moved up the ladder, taking a management position at a chiropractic office, and kept climbing. At one point she was part of the team who created the start-up operation Integrated Physical Health. “I worked with the owners assisting them as they started a company where chiropractic, physical therapy, and orthopedic therapy would be all under one roof.” Responsibilities included supplies, hiring, insurance and patient billing, and basically taking care of whatever needed to be taken care of.
Shannon Sinclair
By 2013, her reputation had preceded her, and a new company reached out. “I was interviewed by Robert [Negosian, COO] while I was on vacation at a lake, and my one concern was if I had enough technical experience to make the jump to an IT consulting company. At that point in time, if I had an ‘IT’ problem, my solution was Control-Alt-Delete!” But her experience combined with being very personable and her ability to communicate made hiring Shannon an easy decision. Her experience provided her with a unique perspective from the healthcare provider point of view, making her exactly what U.S. HealthTek needed. “Robert and the entire team was so great – they all taught me a lot.” (So much so that apparently now that whole “control-alt-delete” thing is no longer her go-to.) She started out with U.S. HealthTek as an assistant project manager. Duties included supporting project managers with their lab integration tasks, such as vendor and client coordination; securing quotes for projects; and documentation support scheduling of team calls. Over time, she moved into a project manager role, handling an ongoing number of integration projects from start to finish. “Thanks to the time spent by other project managers and Robert Negosian, I have learned and been exposed to so much that I now am assigned to highly challenging, complex projects requiring a deeper understanding of technology, and think my background has provided an appreciation for different sides of the lab equation, and by being able to bring different perspectives to the table, which helps navigating the many different challenges faced on a daily basis.”
In 2015 she moved back to Kansas City where she met her future husband Travis. Today they live there with their blended family with a total of four boys, 12-16. Travis is in the medical field as well, working for Kansas City-based Cerner Corporation, a company that develops healthcare-related software and management systems. Her move of course didn’t affect her work for U.S. HealthTek, as the company at its inception was built on a work-from-home model. Still, it requires an adjustment for some employees, Shannon noted. She found that work/life balance is one of the challenges of her work, as in knowing that just because you can check those work emails right before bed doesn’t mean you need to. Sometimes clients happen to be in the area, giving her a chance to connect with them in person; otherwise, “it’s fun to learn where people are from and get to know them in this whole virtual world, developing partnerships and solving issues together.”
Like all the companies she’s worked with before this, she’s grown and taken on new responsibilities. “Another plus side of working here is tackling the constant flow of new tasks, and there’s always new technology to keep up with,” she says. “Technology is an ever-changing world and that’s exciting to me. It’s great to be able to work with an organization that has people who are so knowledgeable … I love learning things every day.”
She’s appreciative of the bigger picture. “We live in a tech world, and I feel good about working with others with the end goal being establishing better, more accurate medical reporting which leads to better patient care. Also, what we do allows for laboratories to deliver those reports more accurately and as fast as possible. The success we achieve with our partners results in doctors being able to spend more time with their patients.”