Guest Profile
Kristin Sunanta Walker
Kristin Walker has been working within the health care field for more than two decades. She started out in medical billing for an Urgent Care center in Southern California. Then she worked as the Financial Manager for a dental practice in Oklahoma. She quickly became the go-to person on staff for any software issues. During her time working in the dental industry she was hired by a practice management firm to help private practices with the business side of their organizations. This experience launched her career as an industry consultant. Kristin also deepened her skills in the database software world and began working with many different organizations—from small businesses to Fortune 1000 companies, to set up in-house software to organize and run their corporate communications, sales, and marketing.
Kristin often had full access to every staff member, from the CEO to the administrative assistants, and became a sounding board for what was “ailing” an organization. It was not always simply their technology. Working with customer relationship management software her role was to delve into the internal workings of an organization and figure out how to customize software to meet their needs for the long-term. This involved not only acquiring the best in CRM solutions but also training the organization how to use it, customizing it, and providing on-going support. As her experience grew she began being asked to provide solutions for larger companies, such as Assurant Healthcare, Dell, The Discovery Channel, and multiple EHR organizations. These contracts required hiring and managing programmers from all over the world to deploy solutions for thousands of users.
As her volunteer work began to move her in the direction of the behavioral healthcare sector Kristin began to notice the frustration of its providers when they were using an EHR. This led to consulting with small EHR organizations. The CRM world had led her to dealing with only the best in software solutions. The EHR world was new and more frustrating in the beginning. She found it difficult to go from representing and working with products that are globally recognized with upwards of seven million users as being the best in the CRM industry, back down to the very insular world of small EHR companies especially in Behavioral Health. She made it her business to understand the EHR industry as a whole and eventually chose to work exclusively in the specialty market that serviced behavioral health organizations.
Her consultative practice was an eye-opening experience. After representing software and revenue cycle management organizations that were nowhere near the high caliber she experienced in the CRM industry, what she learned has helped hundreds of providers and organizations choose software and service providers that lead the behavioral health EHR industry. She is sought out by investment firms looking to fund behavioral health EHRs, EHR vendors and billing firms that service behavioral health providers, ancillary product vendors that also service mental health, and, her great passion, by behavioral health providers and organizations looking to make the right choices when it comes to technology and revenue cycle management.
Kristin is also the host of Mental Health News Radio. She has interviewed leaders in the behavioral health community such as CEO’s of technology companies, counselors, best-selling authors, and global experts in the field of Behavioral Health. Her show is downloaded in over 171 countries and continues its reach with inspiring guests from every corner of the world.
Kristin is on the board of several organizations within Behavioral Health as well as the subject matter expert regarding EHR technology. Multiple strategic partnerships and speaking engagements about childhood sexual abuse, narcissism, and behavioral health technology keep her traveling schedule extremely full as well as being a sought after guest on other popular podcasts.
She is also the author of the upcoming book Emotional Impotence and, yet another, on Corporate Narcissism.
