LORI PRESTESATER SPENT HER CAREER BUILDING COMPANIES AND RUNNING P&LS. THEN SHE JOINED A 175-YEAR-OLD INSTITUTION AND ASKED WHAT IT COULD BECOME.
Laurie McGraw sits down with Lori Prestesater, former Senior Vice President of Health Solutions at the American Medical Association, on the eight years she calls the pinnacle of her career, and the transition out of it.
Most people would not describe the AMA as a high-growth opportunity. Lori came from payers, provider groups, and high-growth technology, and took on the work of turning a traditional publishing organization — one that put out books, codes, and data formats — into a data organization. She is candid that the hard part was never the technology. It was culture, change management, and leading by influence rather than authority, including with the physician volunteers who sit nowhere on an org chart.
The conversation also goes where most leadership interviews do not: what happens when a woman who worked seven days a week and put herself last finally has to decide what she wants next.
In this episode:
- Why a high-growth executive chose a 175-year-old association, and what surprised her when she arrived
- The CPT code set as the backbone of revenue cycle, and why it has to evolve as medicine does
- CPT Intelligence — built on a private large language model, with content tagged using graph database technology — and how it supports autonomous coders, EHRs, payers, and prior authorization
- Why the biggest challenge in any transformation is cultural, not technical
- Building the data labs team with Sandeep Dhamale, and the platform he left behind
- The credentialing product launched during her tenure: under two years in market, just under 150 customers, deployed across just under 700 locations, with customers reporting up to a 30% reduction in physician onboarding time
- Six months to see a primary care physician in San Francisco, and why an incredibly cumbersome application process compounds the shortage for patients, health systems, and physicians alike
- Taking the complex and making it simple — the skill she undervalued early in her career
- Putting mission first when your instinct is growth: the art and science of medicine for the betterment of public health
- Handing Health Solutions to Jeremy Knight, and why she believes he is better suited to the next chapter
- Advising AMA CEO Dr. John Whyte on special projects during her transition
- Moving back to Colorado after years of not living in the same state as her husband
- Moving her mother, who just finished her term as board chair of a hospice organization at 88
- A new grandchild, a daughter navigating new motherhood, a newly married son
- Where board work fits into what comes next, after years spent on the staff side of the table
- Women Business Leaders, and the principle at its core: who mentors the mentors?
- Why senior leadership gets lonely, and why you need people for the good times and the bad
- The book Ask For It, and why she has given it to so many young women
- Her closing advice: be confident, talk less and listen more, know your superpowers, backstop your weaknesses, and build a network that will advocate for you when you struggle to advocate for yourself
Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw.