Yannick d’Assignies of Synapse Revenue Cycle Management
Growth is a key ingredient for businesses to survive in this ever-changing digital landscape. Yet, we must not forget that meaningful human connections will drive business growth, propelling your business to new technological heights. At Synapse, we are not afraid to tread on the deep waters of change, facing the challenge of growing pains and technological advancements with teamwork and innovation at our core.
In this interview, we speak with the Chief Technology Officer about leading the company to a new work set-up while fostering a strong, cohesive team.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Yannick d’Assignies has forged a career in the healthcare industry that has spanned 24 years and counting, helping over 60 small and large businesses with his skills in tech, design, and marketing. Not only is d’Assignies passionate about tech and innovation, but also in managing exciting and avant-garde campaigns that have reached around the globe.
His business acumen and tenacious attitude rapidly attracted clients from coast to coast, including clients in healthcare, fashion, real estate, music, and more. He is proud to have worked with non-profits like Wags Pet Adoption, Bushlife Conservancy, and the WBO (Women in Business), as investing in the community is close to d’Assignies’s heart.
As a forward-thinking individual with excellent communication and organizational skills, d’Assignies started his own design firm and became the CTO of Synapse Revenue Cycle Management. Keeping close ties with old and new clients illustrates his business mantra of developing relationships from the ground up.
Currently, Yannick lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, two kids, and dogs.
I’ve been working in tech for 25 years. I actually started programming at a really early age, and it became something that I really liked working on, and started learning from there. Essentially, I started building sites from the ground up after going through thousands of hours worth of courses. Then, I started getting into tech, security, and app development and that’s when I started Smart Works Intl., a subsidiary digital marketing company of Synapse.
It helped me handle the everyday dev services of our clients that I could not do on my own. Prior to that, I had always been working from home for about 18 years. I found that I just didn’t like working under anybody else’s structure and the only time I went into an office was when we would discuss the milestones for the company’s development.
Yes, it definitely influenced it. What I really wanted to do was be able to give the staff the same type of lifestyle that I wanted, which is being able to come on time for work and spend time with your families as long as the tickets were taken care of, and you are taking time to expand on your skills. I didn’t really care what kind of structure you had for your workday. Some people prefer working at night and some early in the morning. I wasn’t looking for structure within other people’s workdays.
Meanwhile, the work-from-home setup in Synapse was implemented during the rise of COVID-19 in Japan. I understood that working from home was a must for hundreds of Synapse employees and getting them situated was the top priority back then, which included amassing a huge amount of inventory because I knew there were going to be computer shortages as soon as other countries started shutting down. I knew that there needed to be a backup Wi-Fi. I knew that people needed better cameras and better ways to actually communicate within the team.
Ultimately, working from home has influenced even our everyday engagement within the company. I was able to do that because I had already been doing this for so long.
There were tech challenges because we needed to ensure that everyone was secure. We had everyone using company computers, otherwise, when they use their own machines, we’re no longer compliant with the patient information’s security. And then everybody took appropriate trainings to be able to work in this kind of environment. We also had to make sure that we were not short-staffed because some employees would experience outages, which would cause an interruption in the workflow. To overcome this, we have extra staff who are available at all times and running three cycles with 24-hour shifts.
We really appreciate our managers who communicate with their teams, making sure that they greet new employees, see each other on camera, have lunch, and have something to connect with. Without that connection, you don’t really know who your team members are, so you don’t know what they’re best at and you don’t know where you can help them. I think that that’s one of the biggest things that we’re still learning right now as we’re going through this environment.
It kind of sounds corny, but the coolest part for me about working at Synapse is actually the employees. I really like getting to know everybody, especially when you have our company parties. I get to see and meet everybody face to face since I have my hands almost everywhere. I love seeing our new employee bios and what people are creating outside of work, their hidden talents and interests. For instance, I’ve actually been able to approach them and say, “Hey, you know, I think there’s even a better position suited for you that you may want to explore.” Sometimes it’s a little scary, but we’ve been pushing people that way.
Otherwise, if you just have somebody behind the desk that you never connect to, you never really get to know who that person can be at work, and how you can push them to the next level.
My approach to leadership is not micromanaging. I really delegate a lot to my managers and expect a lot from them. I want to know who the different teams are and have my managers always check in with their teams. For example, we have reports that go out every quarter that track not only the team’s progress but also check their mental health. I understand that our mental health affects our work performance and we don’t want to penalize an employee just because there’s something happening at home.
Sometimes, I pop into meetings and start asking questions, like “how can we how can I be a better manager to you?” and “Where are you seeing issues?” Most of the time, people don’t want to answer, but once you start building that relationship and they start trusting you, you start seeing a lot more feedback. It matters when they see the changes that they have asked for from us. As a result, there’s a lot more freedom to speak with the upper management.
And I always want an open line of communication between us because we are only as good as our employees.
One of the things I would say that inspires me is my wife, who is a fourth-grade teacher and understands each individual student and their own learning pathway. She sees that everyone learns at a different pace and it’s not one size fits all. I am bringing her way of teaching into a business setting with over 400 different employees. At the heart of it is the individual journeys, wherein instead of trying to put everybody into the same box, you have to understand how you can get the best out of each individual employee with their own stories.
It’s important for me to know you like coming to work because we spend so much time at our jobs. It’s a snowball effect where if you’re not happy in your job, you’re not going to have good work output. The biggest thing is having that open line of communication and getting feedback from the employees.
One of the ways I try to approach it is seeing what everybody’s strengths are. Instead of going into the next big language or the next big software and trying to learn it, we take a step back and try to see where my employees feel are strongest. A great example would be an employee who is great at graphic design. My advice was to learn first what color is and color theory before learning new software, especially when it comes to healthcare; you constantly have new EHRs and EMRs to learn. To implement this, we brought in Vignettes Learning to have employees learn at their own pace and to create these courses that we think would be best for the employees to take.
It’s not just they’re getting the knowledge that they need, but also retaining the information since it breaks apart the coverage into 5-10 minute increments. So we’re trying to think of how you know in a teaching environment, how is the individual employee going to be able to want to take these lessons, and retain information from these lessons. Unfortunately, it’s a necessary evil that you have to go through a lot of this training, but we make it suited to your pace.
I’ve sat down with a lot of different tech companies who talk about AI. I think AI can be used in a lot of ways, but it is essential to know your purpose for AI. Currently, I have spoken to different companies regarding AI and coding, but we have to be careful whether the program is really AI. I find that there’s a big sticker being slapped on everything calling everything AI, which is not necessarily AI. So I’m very interested in meeting with tech companies and learning more about their products and what they’re developing. There are some great AI in healthcare and I hope to learn more about it.
I always think the more we get away from the human connection, especially within healthcare that requires the human touch, we go farther away from the core values in business.
We want to ensure that AI supports our employees, as opposed to other companies who are actually trying to do the reverse and trying to come down to a skeleton crew and use AI as their primary tool.
The main thing would be trust and honesty. You have to trust leadership and leadership has to trust everyone else under them to have the best product possible. Honesty entails that I know if I’m not doing the job I need to be doing or if I’m behind on something, I need to have enough trust in everyone around me that they’ll let me know that. So I think if those two core values are implemented throughout the company, you will always thrive.
I think right now, the thing I’m most excited about is developing with Smart Works Intl and partnering with Synapse on the analytics side. This means that we are going to be able to pull analytics from a lot of different places and essentially aggregate all that data to have a better idea of what general population health is in large areas. We can see where we can actually come in and make the people healthier. Our gathered data can actually help save lives and keep a population healthy. I think that’s really where we’re going on the tech end.
On the other end, I’m just very excited about the new acquisition and working with Rick Salas and John Kang at Flagstaff International. We have worked with Inspired Diagnostics since the beginning and they love the team. The acquisition by Flagstaff can help bring the entire company to the next level, not only through the current products that we offer but through new services as well, whether that be accounting, bookkeeping, and so on. Currently, we are laying out the vision for the future with them.
Instead of trying to do everything, try to do what you’re best at. Everybody has certain qualities that they’re really good at. Personally, I found that I was good at managing certain individuals at a high level and implementing certain criteria through that. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t try to do things that I didn’t think I was going to be great. I highly encourage you to continuously study go to seminars and read new articles. In my own life, I’m always constantly learning more. It’s constantly reading as much about what new tech is developing and how I can actually understand, so when I’m in meetings, I’m not just throwing out any kind of buzzwords but actually understanding what I’m talking about.
