Full-Throttle CEO: MatrixCare’s Lujan Charts a (Fast) Course

Jonathan Lujan is headed to India in a few weeks.

Before that he has crisscrossed the U.S., practically living on an airplane.

This is what a new CEO of a company in rebirth mode does. This is how you listen to your team members, be they in the Midwest or Mumbai. This is how you hear candid appraisals from your customers. You do it in-person, eyes wide open, ears to the ground.

Lujan is doing all of that, and more. And he’s just getting started.

Meet the new CEO of MatrixCare. The hard-charging man with a plan to elevate an organization that he says has been given a new opportunity as an independent company to reintroduce itself to a fervently competitive EHR marketplace – facility and home-based.

What Is the Plan?

MatrixCare is a leading provider of cloud-based EHR and revenue-cycle management solutions for skilled nursing, senior living, home health, hospice, and life plan communities. It became an independent company on Sept. 1 when Frazier Healthcare Partners acquired the company from ResMed for $490 million.

Shortly after, Lujan was hired to lead MatrixCare. His previous job was CEO of Sight Growth Partners, one of the largest ophthalmology management organizations in the country. Lujan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University, and a BS in Management Information Systems from the University at Albany.

In discussing where he expects to lead MatrixCare and utilize his years of experience in the healthcare sector, Lujan said in the near term his focus is on three things.

“Our customers, our products, and our people,” he said. “I know we need to improve the experience, and we need to make sure that we're solving the problems that matter the most to them. And at the same time, as we're becoming an independent company, it requires us to build the infrastructure and operating discipline, it allows us to move faster and make better decisions.”

Pace Quickens

Speed is a theme he comes back to often, and it’s based on MatrixCare being unshackled from a corporate parent. “We're going to move much faster in the very near term. We're focusing right now on strengthening our core platform and really solving the most important problems for our customers that have the highest need,” Lujan said.

He says the team is ready to move in lockstep with these initiatives and at the same build a new culture. “I've been living on a plane the last few weeks to make sure that I'm meeting as many teammates as I can, to make sure our teammates are empowered to act, and that everyone is driving forward in the same direction with a clear understanding of priorities.”

Beyond the near term, looking out into the medium term, Lujan said the organization wants to earn the right to solve more of their customers’ problems across the board, not just in the clinical space, but clinical, financial, operational, and administrative.

“And we will absolutely accelerate innovation and make sure we’re the technology leader in the industry with no doubt in my mind,” he said.

Innovation in What Form?

When asked what innovation will look like and whether the two letters on everyone’s mind will be at the forefront, he pushed in a new direction.

“We will certainly use AI, but we're not going to use AI just to use AI. Innovation is about listening very, very deeply to our customers. Understanding their problems. I want our product managers out shadowing, standing side by side every nurse that they possibly can, every nurse’s aide, every technician, every financial person,” Lujan said.

He said he wants his team watching and seeing the reality of the frontlines, what's going on, what people are struggling with, and then report back and think innovatively about how to solve this problem for our customers so that way they can truly thrive.

Four Key Hires

To help enact the new way of doing things at MatrixCare, the company recently made four key hires:

Brad Wensel, chief customer officer, will lead MatrixCare's next chapter in customer experience, deepening partnerships, accelerating customer outcomes, and turning customer success into a powerful driver of growth, the company said. Wensel brings more than 20 years of experience transforming customer organizations, most recently as chief customer and transformation officer at Iodine Software and previously with Amazon Web Services and Healthgrades.

Tony DiGiorgio, chief technology officer, will spearhead MatrixCare's technology and product evolution, with a focus on AI, innovation, and building the technology foundation for the future of care. DiGiorgio brings decades of experience scaling enterprise healthcare technology and SaaS platforms, with leadership roles at symplr, TractManager, IBM Watson Health, Phytel, and Elation Health.

Darcy Smith, chief people officer, will strengthen MatrixCare's culture, talent, and organizational capabilities to create an exceptional employee experience and enable sustainable growth, the company said. Smith brings more than 25 years of leadership experience across healthcare, technology, and high-growth organizations, most recently serving as chief people officer at Compass Surgical Partners and Custom Ink.

Scott Harrington, chief transformation officer, will lead strategic transformation initiatives across MatrixCare, helping the organization identify new opportunities, strengthen how it operates, and accelerate progress against its growth priorities. Harrington has more than 15 years of experience in strategy, transformation, product, and operations, with leadership roles at TriNet, Bridgewater Associates, and McKinsey & Company.

Lujan said he spent months finding this quartet, and expects big things from them, collectively.

“Your people are everything. And as you would expect, carving out of Resmed, there were some gaps in leadership. There were some shared services and obviously some gaps as you're no longer relying on a larger parent company to provide some of that,” he said. “These hires are absolutely phenomenal leaders who have built organizations, healthcare, tech companies, and cultures that are focused on taking care of their people and taking care of the customers in robust ways.”

2 Questions, 3 Values

The question this new team and existing staff will ask themselves on a daily basis, he said, is: What are the behaviors that we are rewarding and celebrating? And what are the behaviors that we are tolerating?

“If we're asking those questions and just being introspective every day around this, and it's not just words on a piece of paper, but actual behaviors that we live, that I live as an example, as a leader, and that all my leaders live, and then everyone else sees and lives it, too,” Lujan said.

Beyond the two questions, there are three core values that are super important to MatrixCare, one being customer obsession. “It's like what Jeff Bezos said, when he had the empty chair in the meeting room when he started out Amazon. And everyone's like, ‘What's in the empty chair?’ He said that the customer is in that empty chair,” Lujan said.

The second core value is high accountability. “People should know what they own, what success looks like, and feeling power to deliver. We're not going to be finger pointing. When you're under a big public company, it's easy to finger point to corporate. There's no more corporate. This is us. We have full agency. It's not someone else's job, it's our job,” he said.

The third aspect is communication, proactive, transparent communication. “Healthy organizations debate and they push each other. They talk openly about problems. We're not going to hide things. We're super transparent, and we're going to debate, and we're going to push each other to be our best. And that's all going to be under an underlying base of trust,” Lujan said.

Lesson Learned

In his thinking about what is coming for MatrixCare, he recalls that a career lesson he learned very clearly is that healthcare is fundamentally a human business, and it's a human business in this case enabled by technology, not the other way around.

“You can have an impressive strategy, and it's sophisticated technology, but if you don't understand the workflow of the nurse or the administrator, the physician, the caregiver, or even the patient using it, you're unlikely to create lasting value, and our clinical and product teams, there's a lot of underlying knowledge around that today, and we're going to continue to build that knowledge,” Lujan said.

And no doubt, do it with some speed.

Comments or questions? Contact Patrick Connole at pconnole@parkplacelive.com.