Ashleigh Reeker serves as Fusion’s Vice President of Project Management, leading the execution of enterprise-wide initiatives that amplify Fusion’s impact on healthcare travelers and medical facilities. She has improved processes at Fusion since May 2021 as a consultant and was asked to aid the company’s projects full-time beginning in 2022. This interview provides an insight into Reeker’s approach to her position and how she empowers her teams to reach the company’s goal of Refreshing Healthcare.  

Can you give us an overview of what project management is? 

Project management at Fusion encompasses analyzing problems or opportunities, prioritizing them and leading initiatives that support Fusion’s overarching goals or critical needs. Our project management teams are focused on Fusion’s most strategic initiatives, so they're helping lead how we improve upon today and position us for the future. My team members are catalysts of change and I try to tell them every single day when we're standing up new projects or maybe when we hit roadblocks that what they’re doing matters. They have an opportunity to interact with every division in the company, which is why project management is so cool.  It's such a great career for people who want to understand how businesses work because you get to see how people work to make decisions collectively as a group with the goal of making the business better. 

You lead the project management and business transformation teams. How are those teams helping Fusion empower and support healthcare travelers and medical facilities?  

These teams are directly involved in helping frontline healthcare professionals and the facilities they are working in by focusing on strengthening the organization from the inside out, especially our recruiting teams which interact with travelers daily. We look at what has gotten us this far, what we need to do to continue succeeding in the future, and how we can better serve our travelers. Every healthcare professional has unique needs, and we need to be able to anticipate their needs and understand what they are looking for in their experience with Fusion.  

What are those teams’ biggest priorities? 

Fusion has a lot of talented innovators, and there is no shortage of ideas and drive to execute those ideas. The ultimate challenge for our team has been to dig into those ideas and learn what opportunities for improvement exist that help us maximize our impact. Thankfully, Fusion has a leadership team that understands what steps we need to take to reach our goals, and something we focus on when standing up projects is clearly identifying the objectives and understanding the why behind what we are implementing. This industry has seen a lot of ups and downs in the last few years, and that’s something we can’t avoid. We must be good at recognizing where the industry is, knowing we have ample opportunity to help, and innovating ways to make an impact.  

You have a lot of career experience outside of the healthcare world. How does that experience help you lead Fusion? 

My experience has helped me to understand that ultimately, you've got to meet people where they are. Fusion has evolved a tremendous amount since 2009, and our needs grow and evolve as the company does. It’s important that we honor the past and look forward to how we can build upon the foundation that our founder Sam Wageman and key people in our early days built. Fusion is a place where I can apply the lessons I’ve learned in other experiences, and work every day with people who are, frankly, smarter than me in so many ways. I make it a priority to remind myself that I’m never done growing, and if I’m the smartest person in the room, there’s a problem; I don’t ever feel that way at Fusion. People are a key component. Many of them know what will move the business forward, but they don’t have the empathy for the people it’s impacting. I've worked with a lot of project management professionals that read all the right books and have the degrees, but they missed the mark on really understanding people and what's going to move a business forward rather than enforcing processes on a business when they're not ready for it. The key is to be able to tenderly walk that line of what we roll out, why we roll it out and ultimately what's the impact that we want to have. 

What does Refresh Healthcare mean to you? 

Refresh Healthcare to me is a mindset. It's an approach to what we do every single day. What we've been able to see over the last three to five years is the roller coaster that this industry has gone through. We’re seeing the burnout, the lack of transparency, and travelers looking for clarity on why they do what they do every day. Refresh healthcare is a way that we can approach what we do every single day that equips and empowers our healthcare workers and our facilities to show up and do their best and find joy in what they do.