Leadership Spotlight: Nick Helfrich, Chief Growth Officer

Nick Helfrich joined Certify as Chief Growth Officer in April 2023. A native of Waterloo, Illinois, he holds a BSBA in Business Management and Political Science from Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. His leadership experience in the healthcare sector began at Cerner Corporation in 2011, where he progressed from Client Executive to Director of Sales for CommunityWorks. Throughout his career, Helfrich has held executive leadership roles, developing and maintaining strong relationships with a wide range of organizations, including digital health companies, managed care organizations, health systems, and employers.

Background and Career Journey

Tell us a little bit about why you were attracted to healthcare.

During my childhood, my mom was a nurse practitioner and ran same-day surgery at Children’s Hospital in St. Louis. She always told me she would never be a doctor—way too much school, way too hard, way too much stress, not what you would think. I knew I didn’t have the brain to become a physician. But since she was at Children’s Hospital, I started volunteering there pretty early. One of the questions I’m often asked is what happened there that influenced me. On my very first day of volunteering, I was shadowing open-heart surgery, and the baby passed away on the table. I still remember that moment very clearly—how big and how personal healthcare was and how something not routine, especially a complex surgery like that, changes individuals' lives forever. It just hit differently. I knew from that point forward I’d be in healthcare.

Can you tell us about your career journey and what led you to Certify?

I initially thought I’d get into healthcare litigation. I went to college pre-law and had conversations with advisors who steered me away. They said, “You don’t want to do this. It’s boring—lots of reading.” I was in school in Kansas City at the beginning of the Meaningful Use era, and things were moving really fast in healthcare IT. One of my advisors was in sales at Cerner. They suggested it could be a strong route, and I ended up getting into their sales program. At the time, I just wanted to be in sales. It’s very black and white—you’re either successful or you’re not.

While I was at Cerner, I had the opportunity to be one of the first salespersons of their startup division, selling back into rural hospitals like the one in my small town in rural Illinois. They were just standing up that division, and I wanted to be a part of it. I asked the sales leader there, a gentleman named Michael Farrell, if I could be on that early team. He said yes, shockingly enough. I don’t think I necessarily deserved it, but he gave me a territory and a chance. That opportunity to join that team, be a part of its scale, I learned and grew a lot. A lot of my own philosophy still stems from there.

Over the next almost 15 years, I had the opportunity to work in healthcare on the provider side with large health systems. Then I jumped into health plans and the employer business, working a lot with benefits and scaling complex networks. I saw the issues these groups have with scale. So, when I heard about Certify, it was a no-brainer, especially after a couple of conversations and some beers. It made sense that Certify isn’t necessarily serving an individual human dealing with a chronic metabolic disease or any sort of healthcare condition, but if we do our job the right way, we’re helping a ton of people downstream through our digital partners or health plans that can then serve their members. That’s what really brought me here—the ability to make an impact across way more than improving chronic conditions like diabetes or improving chronic pain. It’s our chance to do more. You hear about how much healthcare expense there is—we literally cut into and eliminate that healthcare expense and waste through our provider data intelligence insights.

Leadership and Management

Can you share any management insights?

My management insights—it’s funny, it goes back to those first moments. It’s always been so personal to me. I feel like we’re not managing assets; we’re leading people and humans. I remember the first person I ever let go. One of the mistakes I made was saying, “It’s not personal.” He said, “How is this not personal? It’s my life. It’s my career.” That stuck with me. The other thing I really anchored on is my very first manager, who I worked for for eight years—which feels like a long time in today’s world. He cultivated a servant leadership atmosphere; if I’m serving you and the people I’m working with, it will ultimately be better for me and the company. I shouldn’t focus on what’s better for me, but if I’m serving you, helping you, and giving you the resources, coaching, and skills you need to be successful, that will really benefit the company and everybody at the end of the day. So, I’ve really anchored on strong servant leadership and how I can serve individuals here.

If we look at how that impacts Certify—if we think collaboration and accountability are at the core of our success and our values—I think coming to the table and being willing to help our peer associates will ultimately drive the right results. It’s not always easy, but if we’re willing to sit in the trenches and tackle the deep problems with our partners, we will get the right results. That only happens through culture, something I feel like I’m leaning into more and more every day: what is the right culture? We are happy with our culture, but culture can always get better, and will. That leadership piece has always been a part of it.

I’ve always believed people buy from people, so I’ve always wanted to be myself. In my early days here, I decided to be unapologetically myself, and luckily, it hit home for a lot of individuals on the team when we first started. If you talk to Mitch Gorodokin or some of the other four people who were on the team when I got here, I think it opened the door for everybody to relax a little bit and just focus on doing good work with good people.

The Certify Experience

What at Certify are you most excited about right now?

I’m most excited about the fact that we spent the first three or four years doing the really hard work, the unsexy building of a data infrastructure that we can actually scale on. It’s complex; it’s not easy. But if you do it the right way, everything gets easier long term. We’re starting to see that. If you look at the partners who chose to work with us—large national health plans, Blue Plans, really large Management Services Organization networks—they’re feeling that; they see that in the results, they see that in faster turnaround times and lower costs. We’re not throwing people at a problem that’s historically been solved with large Business Process Outsourcing companies; we’re using technology. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we hadn’t spent the first three years focused on that technology. Now we’re at the point where the technology is powering the applications, and that helps us with our core services and being a Credentials Verification Organization (CVO) for health plans. It’s going to help us expand into being a provider data management company, displacing incumbents in the market through a technology platform. That’s really exciting.

I think being a CVO is great. As we expand within these partnerships, it’s going to be exponential. That’s what I’m really excited about. That’s why I laugh about the other companies operating alongside us in this space. As an analogy those companies remind me of point solutions in the care coordination space—they solve one problem, they solve one chronic condition. We are the health plan. We’re trying to solve everything with that data-first platform, and that’s what’s exciting to me—that we have the foundation to do that for the next three, four, five years.

What’s your favorite thing about working for Certify?

My favorite thing about working for Certify is an easy answer: the people. I especially love working with our growth team. And we’re solving a systemic problem in healthcare—things that are commodities, things that every health plan has to do shouldn’t be complicated; they shouldn’t be expensive. I honestly feel like, for the first time in my career, I have a legitimate shot at decreasing the administrative burden in US healthcare. We’re a small company now, but we won’t be small forever. If we follow our mission of one API, one provider ID, we’re going to make a really big impact.

You can learn more about Nick’s leadership journey in his bio. Nick, thank you for sharing your experiences with us.

If you are interested in joining our team, see our Careers page to find open positions.