At CareATC, client success is about more than managing accounts. It's about building lasting relationships and driving real impact. We sat down with Derek Brown, Vice President of Client Success for the West and Shared Site zones, to hear about his journey, his philosophy on whole-person care, and what keeps him passionate about the work.
Derek Brown: There's no such thing as a typical day, and that's not exclusive to my role. I serve as Vice President of Client Success for our West and Shared Site zones here at CareATC, which encompasses all of our public and private sector organizations in the West, as well as our shared access markets in Tulsa, St. Louis, DFW, and a few others. I work with a team of Client Success Directors on a daily basis, and my role is truly the intersection of strategy, operations, and relationship management.
A typical day involves ongoing collaboration with clinical and operational peers. The support structure we have in place affords our clients additional resources and allows us to look through multiple perspectives, from the client side to the clinical and operational side, to ensure we're showing up as true partners and helping our clients get the most value from CareATC.
I've been with the organization about a year and a half, but I bring over 15 years of healthcare management experience, including just under a decade with a competitor in the space. So while I haven't been here long, I have a pretty broad foundation in worksite healthcare and look forward to many more years here.
Derek Brown: I was drawn to CareATC because of the mission-driven approach. Everyone in this space talks about delivering high-quality healthcare, but CareATC truly believes in the mission. I've seen the accessibility, the ongoing focus on prevention, and the commitment to long-term outcomes that goes well beyond the sales process. Being close to the decisions, I can see that we're genuinely living up to the guarantees we put out to our clients and prospective clients.
What's kept me here are the people and the impact. CareATC doesn't just talk about the whole-person approach; they live it. I've seen firsthand how this work improves lives and strengthens organizations, and it creates a culture of well-being where employees genuinely want to work there, not just need to. That resonates with me, and it carries through to things like employee satisfaction and retention as well.
Derek Brown: Our role isn't directly clinical, but we must know enough to be effective when our clinical counterparts aren't in the room. Whole-person care doesn't exist in a vacuum. Within client success, it's about ensuring we are truly considering the physical, mental, emotional, and social factors that influence someone's well-being, and that goes beyond just what's happening at work. The influences impacting someone in the field often correlate with what's happening at home too, so it's important to address both, because they overlap quite a bit.
It also means designing programs that meet people where they are, removing barriers to care, building trust, and creating continuity through relationship building. Those are the pillars of what we do at CareATC.
From a leadership perspective, it's equally important to support our teams through that same whole-person lens, so they can bring their best selves to work every day. If we take a different approach internally, it's contradictory to the culture we're promoting. It applies to everyone regardless of role.
Derek Brown: Generally speaking, the most rewarding thing for me is watching a client who starts out skeptical of the value gradually become a true partner and advocate for CareATC. Someone who goes from neutral or uncertain to actively recommending our name and services to friends and colleagues. That doesn't happen overnight. It can take six months, a year, sometimes three to five years. I'm proud of the teams during those periods because maintaining optimism and pushing forward through difficult relationships is genuinely hard.
There's one client that comes to mind. Following some less constructive meetings, we reconnected with their leadership, dug into the data, and had honest conversations about what was and wasn't working. Not only did we ultimately maintain the contract, but over the past six months we've already expanded it significantly. We took something that was a potential loss and turned it into a real win. That's one of the moments that sticks with me.
Derek Brown: The advice I'd share is to remain curious and lead with empathy, which are core pillars at CareATC. The best outcomes, whether with patients, clients, or colleagues, come from listening first, asking questions, and remembering that relationships are the foundation of everything we do. Processes change, structures change, clients change, but relationships are the constant. That's been one of the clearest differentiators I've seen at CareATC and past organizations, and I think it only becomes more important as technology continues to evolve.