Brandon Payne, Executive Director at BlueStep. Formerly Marketing Intern Director of Growth VP, Behavioral Healthcare Executive Director

I spent three years at Havenwood Academy, a residential treatment program in Cedar City, Utah, and finished as Director of Growth as part of the leadership team. My job was to increase admissions and decrease churn. We accomplished that through creative online marketing solutions and building a world-class treatment experience. The entire company ran on an EHR called BlueStep, which was my introduction to their product.

BlueStep had tons of gaps that were not fulfilling our needs, but it was highly customizable and built with a proprietary coding language. I taught myself that coding language and began leveraging BlueStep as an instrument to help our company get really efficient.

We built all kinds of new automations, dashboards, auditing tools, and more. Rather than BlueStep being a strain on our operations, we turned it into a center point for delivering care and high quality experiences to patients, their families, and our employees.

I took what I learned at Havenwood and joined a data consulting firm called Xantie to broaden my reach. I became excellent at building out impactful dashboards and insights within clinical and financial data for residential treatment centers, and Xantie already had a presence in behavioral healthcare doing this. I joined their team and ran with their behavioral healthcare clients.

When our largest contract was cancelled on us, an insurance billing company, I was left to figure out how we replace that income. This contract alone made up more than 90% of my division's revenue. Rather than leaning into more consulting work, I began building plug and play products and partnered with BlueStep to do it.

The two products I personally designed and shipped began getting traction in the market. I started getting a reputation in the industry as a go to for data and technology consulting. And BlueStep was paying attention.

When BlueStep's leadership saw what we were building on their infrastructure, they acquired our business and hired me as Executive Director, the first dedicated executive operator in the company's twenty year history. I'm the primary operator for the division. Product vision, engineering, marketing and sales, implementations and the P&L all roll up to me.