Overview

The PPS Corporate office houses most of the departments that support our field organization and customer care centers.

Location

The PPS corporate headquarters and training center is located in Novato, California, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco.

Roles

The corporate office includes the following departments:

• Information Technology
  The information technology (IT) team has two primary functions. The administrative services team operates the HelpDesk; oversees the centers' computers, phones, network systems, and printers; and implements new technology. The development team creates, maintains, and improves our core information applications. They work with our enterprise applications and the PPS Intranet to develop tools that provide information to manage the business.
• Finance
  The finance team leads strategic planning and ensures the company's fiscal health. Finance consists of accounting, business development, and payroll. The business development team looks for possible acquisitions and partners for continued growth and opportunities. The accounting team directly supports the field by providing financial reporting, payroll, expense/mileage reimbursement, and payables management.
• Operations
  The operations team supports the field with purchasing, fleet management, leasing, equipment repair, inspections, incident reports, and sentinel events, as well as looking for improved operational efficiency.
• Compliance
  The compliance and quality assurance team manages matters relating to the quality of service provided to patients and ensures the company's compliance with federal, state, and local regulatory requirements. The team includes the general counsel, who is also the compliance and privacy officer, the manager of licensing and compliance, a licensing coordinator, and an accreditation administrator, as well as four field auditors who routinely visit the centers and perform quality assurance assessments.
• Training
  The role of the training team is to develop and deliver state-of-the-art training to ensure that all PPS team members have the knowledge they need to succeed, with the goal of making our teams increasingly successful.
• Human Resources
  The human resources team partners with business leaders across the company to proactively develop programs that support strategic business initiatives. Human resources offer the following services: recruitment, benefits administration, employee relations, and workers' compensation administration.
• Marketing
  The marketing team supports sales in many ways. Marketing performs research and develops messaging and sales collateral that can be used by the sales team to effectively communicate our quality service, our processes that lead to quality service, and how our service differs from the competition.

A Day in the Life of an IT Systems Analyst

Kedar Relangi, Novato, California

At Pacific Pulmonary Services, the team of IT Systems Analysts has an encyclopedic knowledge of every phase of our business because each of them "owns" a domain in which they analyze, develop, support and enhance systems that directly address business decisions. These vertically structured assignments bring them in close contact with the PPS field employees, managers, department decision-makers as well as other members of the IT team. This hands-on, business-driven IT operation has resulted in analysts being able to improve their allocation of resources, be more informed in setting priorities, and to target low input, high results enhancements.

Kedar Relangi has been with PPS a year and already has made major contributions to his development domain encompassing Sales and Operations. He talks about a typical day: "I have 3 main areas of responsibility that I juggle each day. I support the PPS team as they call in with daily issues, work the 2 or 3 longer term projects that I own, and do lots of small projects...for me that usually involves developing reports to target current business issues." Compared to previous IT positions Kedar enjoys the variation in his work routine at PPS.

Every two weeks, each Analyst spends 2 days as the customer support specialist. The day starts early as he fields phone calls, voice messages, and email inquiries covering every aspect of the IT systems. Kedar says that this is a great opportunity for cross training as his team always finds time to consult with him on their area of expertise. He noted that with his emphasis on sales systems, "the first 5 days of the month are crazy," and that he appreciates his flexible schedule when he works weekends that fall during those days.

His long-term projects have taken him to the Bakersfield Reimbursement center and Peak Sleep. Kedar says, "I appreciate interacting directly with the user as they work on the system. They open up more with me and are more apt to make suggestions. If I see how they are using the software I can make a really good product." While Kedar was working with a pharmacy rep, she noted that the report she used was alphabetical and that she needed to make calls by oldest expiration date first. He said it took only a half hour to build her a report sorted by expiration date that also included the physician's phone number. This simple change reduced the weekly completion time for this task by 50%!

When asked if he'd learned anything new at PPS, he responded, "I've been used to writing my own code, and taking a year to implement a system. Here we are open to investing in vendor technology that can be quickly modified and introduced to meet immediate business changes. In my last job a small change might take two months to implement. Here we have so much technology and capability...a big change for a user may be a minor effort for a developer." As for working in the Novato office, Kedar says, "Before I was always 'the IT guy', here all the departments work in proximity, I can go to the source, everyone is easy to reach and everyone reciprocates!"

Read about other careers at PPS

Sales |  Center Operations |  Customer Care Center |  Peak Sleep |  Pharmacy |  Billing & Reimbursement

"Before I was always 'the IT guy', here all the departments work in proximity, I can go to the source, everyone is easy to reach and everyone reciprocates!"

- Kedar Relangi, Systems Analyst, Novato, California