Building a Mental Health Benefit Physicians Will Actually Use

Kelsey Willock Welcome, Allison King, VP of People Operations at Sound Physicians. We're so excited to have you this Friday. To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit more about yourself, your background, and where you're calling in from today. Allison King Thanks Kelsey, I'm excited to be here today.

Thanks for having me. My name, as you said, Allison King. I live in the foothills and farmland of Western Massachusetts, and I am the VP of People Operations at Sound Physicians. And so what I own is the infrastructure and the operational aspect of our people team, as well as total rewards.

So we span from benefits compensation all the way to the operational and systems functions within people teams. Kelsey Willock and tell me a little bit about the workforce at Sound Physicians. Allison King Yeah, absolutely. We are a national healthcare system.

And so we have colleagues that range from, you know, folks that are on the site, working with our hospitals, doing the administration and helping, you know, one-on-one with our physicians. And then we have all the way to our physicians, clinicians, nurses, anesthesiologists. So we have a very wide range of ⁓ different physicians within sound and a lot of needs and requirements that come along with all of the different aspects of our people. Kelsey Willock excited to ask you a whole lot more about the company and the initiatives you've worked on at the company.

But before we get there, I want to get to know you a little bit better. So if you'll excuse me, I'd love to hear what's your earliest memory of money? Allison King Yeah. It's so funny when I was thinking about this the first thing I thought of was I had a piggy bank when I was young of course I think a lot of people have that and I'll be honest.

I don't even know where I got the change I probably just found change in places I probably stole it from my parents maybe even you know from a Chore I did but when that piggy bank was heavy I would just dump it all out and my family my parents had those coin wrappers that you would shove the coins into the paper coin rolls and I would fill those up and my mom would take my brother and I to the bank and we would exchange those cash for dollar bills. And ⁓ I probably bought Barbies or something with it that you know I had fun with but what's funny about that thinking back is I'm pretty sure that's when I really started to get interested in numbers and I have my degree in math, oddly enough.

And so I loved trying to figure out how many pennies were in a quarter, how many pennies equal to dollar and trying to, you know, add up all of that stuff. And I think that kind of planted the seed to my data nerdiness. so that's, yeah, that's my first kind of memory, my earliest memory of money. Kelsey Willock Kind of very similar early memory, but the only difference is I remember being very incentivized by lollipops.

It's like, have to, I have to get to the bank because they have the best lollipops. It was less about cash for me. Allison King ⁓ yeah. Yes!

So true, so true. Kelsey Willock Lovely you have a math background. Can you say a little bit more about that because it's such an interesting trajectory from that kind of a degree to what you're working in, although it also just totally makes sense. Allison King Yeah.

It is, it's so funny that I have like a very interesting background where I have my degree in mathematics, I have a minor in ballet, and I actually, you know, do nothing with either of them at this point, but I think that it really showed me that I use both sides of my brain. I have that artistic side, but also that that very strict black and white side. ⁓ and I like to switch back and forth with that. And after college, I think I studied math one because I just like numbers.

I like data. I think of it as a puzzle and I really like puzzles and I was good at it. But also, thinking through, wanted to be an actuary at the time. think that was like one of the highest paid positions you could get.

And that really was like motivating me ⁓ to get my degree. And then when I really came down to it, I liked working with people a lot and I didn't want to just sit behind a desk and crunch numbers all day. I worked in retail. And so through that, I really started to understand a customer experience and managing employees and I think that's kind of what gravitated me towards the HR realm.

And then once I was in HR as a generalist, I really loved working on kind of that infrastructure and operational aspects. you know, looking at how processes are working, what is better ways to streamline things, how can we use data, and I think my math background actually really got me interested in compensation and benefits because of all the data and the numbers that are involved with those two aspects. So I've really gravitated towards that because of my math background. Kelsey Willock So cool.

I think when you're not in this world, it's hard to wrap your head around it. payroll and health care, these are the largest line items in companies' bank accounts. And so a lot of attention and analysis, mathematical background applied to it is so important. So really, really cool.

Backing up, though, even further, what was your first job? And do you recall what you spent your first paycheck on? Allison King Right. Yes.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yes. you Yeah, so as I said, I worked in retail and so 17 years old, I was able to work at Hollister and so Abercrombie and Fitch, Hollister, like a lot of 17 year olds wanted to go that direction and so the mall near me had opened up a Hollister and I was so excited.

I had just turned 17. I begged my parents to get this job and I have no idea what I spent my paycheck on but it was probably back into that store buying the clothes that I was going to wear at the job that I was doing so and then you know funny enough is that ended up being my first full-time job as well out of college is I stayed with Hollister for five years after that and became an assistant manager and that was my first full-time job out of college. And that I specifically remember my first paycheck being spent on a Bulova watch that I still have today.

It was like the chunky silver watch that was in style then. I don't wear it, but I know exactly where it is. And I just, know it's, yeah, it's just that little token. It wasn't rose gold, was silver, but it did have the little diamonds next to the numbers.

So fancy. Kelsey Willock I know exactly the watch that you're talking about. Was it rose gold? Yep.

Yep. Couldn't remember it more, but I do think it probably come back in style as ⁓ fashion itself. Allison King Yes. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

It does, for sure. Kelsey Willock How do you think your money story has influenced how you think about pay and benefits on behalf of your employees? Allison King Yeah, ⁓ I would say it's not necessarily, I try not to put my own experiences into decisions that I make within benefits and compensation. I, again, am a data person.

And so I want to look at what others are desiring, get actual feedback from our employees. And so I started at Sound a year and a half ago. And one of the first things I did was a survey. And I find that surveys are just such a great tool if you do it correctly.

I think that if you just survey people to find out information, that's not worth their time and you have to have some sort of action after that survey. I learned two things during that experience. One being that regardless of the level of income a colleague had, they just did not know what we offered. They didn't know how to use what we offered.

They weren't aware of the different benefits. We had actual people recommending benefits we already had within the survey. And so that was a big lesson learned is that there hadn't been a lot of education and communication around the benefits program that we provided. And then two, which kind of answers your question is that our workforce has such a gap between our highest paid employee and our lowest paid employee.

We're talking about, you know, physicians who maybe have already paid off all of their student loan debt and they're making good money and their biggest focus is 401k and tax savings. How can they invest their money and learning more about their money? Whereas folks that are not as highly paid and are just really looking for affordable healthcare. Healthcare has been rising so hard.

And so how can they just stay above it and how can we help them with that? And so I think that money really, and income really changes how you need to view your benefits and what you offer based off of who your employees are. so, and even not even just role specific, If you think about physicians, there's such a big spectrum even with that. You have folks that are you know, done with their student loans, they've been in the, they've been, you know, caring for patients for so long.

And then you have people straight out of school who have such enormous student loan debt that yes, they're well paid, but they're, they're, the money that they take home is very little and they're still, you know, working paycheck to paycheck trying to pay off their student loans. So even just within one role is a big gap. So just paying attention to that and seeing how money usage within your your organization can impact the benefits and the comp that you provide them. Kelsey Willock It sounds like a lot of the findings had to do with, you know, the financial well-being of employees.

Whether it was addressed or not directly in that survey, it sounds like it was a theme that evolved. How important is financial well-being to the company? Allison King Yeah. Right.

Exactly. It's huge, I would say. We have physicians that don't really know what their annual at-home take home ⁓ is. They have various shift pay, they're moonlighting, they're doing night shifts, they're doing day shifts.

There's all sorts of ways that they earn their money and it's hard to understand what exactly that annual income is. And so having education around that, especially with How do you even decide what percentage to contribute to your 401k when you don't know what exactly each paycheck is going to look like? How can we help them with making decisions on Roth vs. pre-tax and how does that impact their tax?

How can they utilize HSA as a retirement tool instead of just a healthcare tool? And so giving them all of these options and educating them on how to use it is exactly what's needed. You can't just provide the benefits without educating them how to use it. It's great to have a good match or offer enrollment right away, but you need to educate them and tell them how to use the tools as well so they can get the biggest impact.

Kelsey Willock You know, it's a topic that I have heard about so much over the past year. I've interviewed, you know, over 150 folks in positions similar to And I would say this isn't the top three, know, misunderstanding, listing benefits and total rewards that leads to things like confusion, maybe lack of appreciation. We understand how much our employer pays us. We're also living in a really interesting time where Allison King yeah.

Right. Bye. Kelsey Willock ensuring privacy is really important. So we've got this situation where we want to better personalize and market effectively to people.

So we're meeting them where they are. We're not just, you know, sending out a pamphlet that says, you know, here's your 50 benefits. How do you think about that? And are there any tools that you've used or concept that you've introduced that have helped move that?

Allison King I would say that I am on the AI bandwagon and I have been having a lot of fun vibe coding and creating new different tools and things and one of those that I've been working on is actually like a medical benefits decision informer, guess. so answering some questions, being careful with what you're asking. You you don't want to ask about claims information or healthcare information, but more lifestyle. Do you prefer being a little bit more risky and, or do you prefer to know exactly what you're going to be spending every day or every doctor's visit?

And so being able to collect some of that information and helping inform what would each plan look like based off of how your risk tolerance is, how many, you know, office visits you have you're expecting that year. Do you have kids who, you know, are athletes who are breaking bones all the time or going to the ER and so how does that all come together and inform your colleagues with even just what medical plan that does you. they want to decide. And so I think that a big thing that is coming is more personalized tools that are even being built by the subject matter experts themselves within the organizations.

Kelsey Willock So I want to double click on that. It's so cool to hear that you yourself are building these tools because a lot of question to folks build versus buy. And I'm hearing a lot of build internally. When you think about doing that and how receptive is the organization, particularly given a lot of the data that you might be using, especially around health care data, is so sensitive.

Allison King Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Our sound physicians is just completely has invested in learning more and becoming utilizing AI more. And so we have a VP who's in charge of their AI and we have an AI committee and we're really encouraging, you know, team members to get in and play around. We offer a co-pilot that feeds into all of your different office tools. And so being able to create within the framework that our security and compliance teams have created for us is something that's very important.

And I think that you have to have the experts on those specific teams to be able to help you with implementing tools. I'm at the very beginning stages of creating things. I haven't deployed anything yet, but when I do, my first person is going to be talking to security, to IT, and to ensure that even just basic questions that don't highlight somebody's PII or PHI, are those okay to ask and store in our system? And so getting the right people involved, I'm not a security expert, but we have one and so I'm gonna definitely be a big partnership with them.

Kelsey Willock I think it's a great model to follow because it really incentivizes creativity using the next generation of tools that are out within really important guardrails. So for the listening, if you're afraid to use AI tools operating within those guardrails, whether it's working with your security and legal teams, can help you ease that anxiety. Am I allowed to do this or not? Well, build it if they'll allow you to deploy it.

Allison King Yes. Absolutely. All Right. Talk to the IT team, see what's available.

I also have my own personal accounts that I use. I have a cloud account, have ChatGPT, and I will build through those using absolutely no employee data, creating, you know, spreadsheet of dummy data that is tied to absolutely nothing and see what I can do with those tools and just playing around without the information actually being company information. So that's kind of how I've been getting into it. I'm a doer for learning and so I have to do in order to learn and really digest what's going on and so that's just how I've approached it.

Kelsey Willock Yeah, I totally agree with you. Total learn by doer on my end. I think that there are so many free tools that you can play around with. And it's an interesting time to, it's hard to sit in a session to learn how to use these tools, just to get your hands or watch someone else use them.

That's another really great way. So I want to talk a little bit about benefits themselves, because we're in a real interesting time. You'd already mentioned, you know, healthcare costs are increasing. Allison King Yeah.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Kelsey Willock Can you tell me about a benefit that you've introduced, whether it's this company or prior, maybe Hollister, that you saw from really just attracting talent to transforming the lives of employees? Allison King you Yeah, I think the biggest one that came to mind is mental health at sound. We transitioned from your basic employee assistance program to something a little bit more geared towards clinicians and physicians.

And so. EAPs are not a one size fits all. And they have to be used with intention. You can't just get your EAP and just hope that it's never needed.

You gotta actually have the communication education, teach your leaders how to use it and ⁓ how they can bring those resources to their teams. But specifically with sound, an EAP for a of software engineers is not going to be the same as an EAP for physicians. They have a lot different needs. They are dealing with extreme burnout, patient deaths, know, needle sticks, random things that you don't think about every day.

It's so, so specialized and do you, they're not going to want to go and call a therapist for something that was really traumatic that they experienced that day, where someone's going to say, you know what, think you just need to set better boundaries. That's why you're burned out. They need someone who actually understands and has that empathy and that experience to create the support for them. I'm a huge fan of The Pitt and I'm probably going to be.

Kelsey Willock Just in case you're wondering that. Allison King I'm going to be scolded for saying this, the truth, like you truly see even on The Pitt, just the emotional and mental taxation that these physicians, these nurses, even the hospital staff are going through and how different it is from, you know, a tech company or even myself, I don't have to deal with any of that. And so the support that they need is so much bigger. if you need to understand that, watch The Pitt because it is, it will definitely give a deep dive into it and just see that experience that they go through every day.

And it just wouldn't shift. Kelsey Willock I wasn't going to bring it up, but I'm glad that you did bring it up. I didn't know if it was insensitive or not, given I'm not someone that works in the healthcare space. But I talked to a lot of healthcare leaders and it's so right that going back to what you said before, you need to personalize the experience for your people because everyone's coming from different places and doctors have a extreme stress and anxiety given the work they do.

And so how do you support? I imagine it's a lot of boots on the ground type mental health support. imagine it's Allison King you Yeah. Kelsey Willock you can't even communicate to them by way of email probably because they're on their feet.

⁓ Allison King Exactly. Exactly. They're not reading their emails. They're caring for patients.

They're at the bedside. And so how can we meet them there? And we're just starting to scratch the surface with that. have ⁓ our practice management teams that are on site that we want to train and provide those resources to them so they can flag it to their leaders, really getting that ⁓ information out there for our medical directors and the other leaders that are on site to help and know, you know, this event happened today, now my very first thing that I think of is I need to call that colleague assistance program and schedule someone to come into the on-site to help with, you know, grief counseling or a traumatic event.

And so being able to have a program that provides in-person support and group support is really important as well. So when we were looking at a new colleague assistance program, that was a huge thing is how can we really support our physicians and provide them the mental health and meet them where they are. Kelsey Willock beyond the obvious because absolutely the right thing to do when you think about introducing, whether it's mental health support or otherwise, what's the measurable impact that you're seeking to have?

Allison King Yeah. I would say so we. We just want, right now it's the data, colleague experience surveys, understanding. We don't use the same colleague experience survey for our business colleagues, the people behind the scenes in finance, HR, payroll, IT, all of those teams have a different survey than our clinicians.

so the clinicians is focused on some of those questions about wellbeing. Also, talking with our clinicians is huge. can't just go based off of data. You have to actually have those conversations.

And so we have talent partners who are working closely with those leaders and trying to understand, you know, what does well-being mean to them? How is mental health involved in that? What is mental health even? It's such a broad, you know, topic that we use to really just blanket, you know, all sorts of different aspects of I guess mental well-being.

you know, burnout is huge within physicians. And so even just some of the data about, you know, bed turnaround time or, ⁓ you know, when, how long does it take and how much stress does it take to put in your charts? And is there, you know, again, of The Pitt, is there some sort of automation to go along with that? And so it's, we're collecting, data, but we're also collecting conversations and, you know, understanding the empathy around that.

And once we have enough of that information, we'll be able to track it and really see over time, how is that impact and how can we either improve it, shift focus. And every period of time is different. So during COVID, there was much better, much more need for urgent mental health and burnout and know, contagious disease and you know, the increase in patient deaths during that time, it's extremely stressful. so, kind of was, I lost track of what I was saying, but.

Kelsey Willock No, think the thing is, there's a phenomenal answer. It's not just one thing, it's so many. And it's so many data to understand what's really going on. Allison King It is, it's so many things.

Yes. And it's so, yeah, it's so many things to different people too. So. When one person thinks about mental health, they're thinking, okay, I don't have the flexibility I want.

I work night shifts. I don't get to see my kids go to bed. Or it's, I have had a couple unfortunate patient deaths and I'm going through a lot of grief, a lot of questioning, you know, my purpose. And so there's such a spectrum within mental health and you really need to figure out White aspects of that is needed within your within your colleague population Kelsey Willock Well, thanks for sharing that with me.

One of the things you've mentioned, couldn't get Santos out of my head charting, I think it's beside humor, but I think that it's so, so deeply important to support the population. These are the caregivers of human lives. ⁓ Allison King I know. Honestly.

Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah. And it's real.

Yeah. Right. Right. And yeah, I could smile about The Pitt because it's a show, but in reality, that's real life.

Of course it's, you know, fabricated to be a TV show. It's not going to be exactly the same, but it gives you for those who aren't in healthcare and aren't experiencing, what those physicians, clinicians, nurses are experience it, it shows, ⁓ it provides a little empathy by seeing it, you know, somewhere where on TV. Kelsey Willock Right. Allison King ⁓ where you went normally.

Kelsey Willock Great. Great. Well, thank you, Allison, so, much. I have just one last question for you.

Before we wrap up, what compensation and benefits trends do you think are going to shape the employee experience most over the next year? Allison King Yes. Yeah, I think ⁓ I'm going to own my answer as AI, but not in the way that normally people are thinking about it when it comes to the analytics and all of that. But as I was talking through having subject matter experts being the one to build the tools and being able to personalize those tools to your employee population is going to be really big.

so even starting small into an interactive benefits guide to something as big of, you having a tool that recommends all of the different benefits for you based off of your lifestyle. And so I think that there's going to be a lot more personalized tools at the benefit and comp teams fingertips where they're used to having a large price tag attached to it. Kelsey Willock Yeah, that last piece is really important. We can kind of think about this less fearfully and recognize there's a lot of opportunity to do these unique things right now, whether it's having employees at the companies themselves explore building them at a lower cost.

We have amazing technology at our fingertips right now, and I think we're just scratching the surface of what it can mean. But it can certainly do a whole lot for the things that are affecting organizations most, like Allison King We are. Kelsey Willock lack of understanding of benefits. Allison King Right, yeah.

And if I could just give people some advice is it's scary, it's new, but it's not going anywhere. And so even just playing around with ChapGPT or whatever tool is your favorite on a personal note too. I've used it just for creating personalized coloring books for my five year old. And so just even just dabbling in it a little bit to get used to it is just my for anyone who hasn't yet.

Thank you. Kelsey Willock I absolutely love that. So thank you again, Allison, so, so much for this conversation. Where can our listeners connect with you beyond it?

Allison King Yeah, absolutely. I try to be active on LinkedIn. So my page is Allison King HR. So you can follow me or connect with me there.

And I try to share tools and operational advice, total rewards advice. So yeah, LinkedIn. Kelsey Willock Go connect with Allison everyone and have a wonderful weekend. Thank you so much again for joining us.

Allison King Thanks Kelsey so much.