Meet the Staff

Kirk Strawn, M.D., is the founder, President, and Medical Director of PopHealthMan. Kirk earned his medical degree at the University of Iowa and completed his residency in family medicine in Scottsdale, Arizona. In addition to leading PopHealthMan, he is a board certified family practitioner and currently serves as Medical Director of complementary therapies for the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center in Scottsdale, Arizona. He has spent much of his medical career developing clinical management programs for high-risk populations. Kirk’s interests include improving and funding high-risk patient interventions, leveraging clinical information systems and improving end of life care.

Deb Hecker is the Chief Executive Officer of PopHealthMan. Deb joined the organization in June of 2008, and now provides her significant knowledge in optimizing Medicare Advantage Revenue to our clients. In her previous role as CFO of a large medical group in Arizona, Deb was responsible for all things financial, with particular emphasis on Medicare Advantage risk adjustment revenue and related processes. Her experience includes the implementation of numerous initiatives to capture appropriate diagnosis codes both retrospectively and prospectively, in addition to the development of various metrics and measurement tools for tracking and reporting results.

Deb has been working with Medicare and Medicaid products for over 12 years. She is a CPA, and received an MBA from Arizona State University and a BA in Accounting from Michigan State.

Royce Brownfield has been working in healthcare analytics over the last 20 years and has been deeply involved in CMS Risk Adjustment since 2002. Prior to starting PopHealthMan with Dr. Strawn, Royce was an integral member of a multi-disciplinary task force that increased the Risk Adjustment Factor and revenue of an Arizona MAPD plan by 20% over three years. In doing so, he investigated and discovered several sources of lost diagnosis data, thereby improving the documentation of that plan’s illness burden.

Since joining PopHealthMan, Royce has used his extensive expertise to design the vital tools used to manage the Risk Adjustment process for our clients. He consults directly with our clients and combines a unique blend of available tools and services to optimize their revenue to the fullest potential.

Royce has an MBA from the University of Texas, and he and his family have lived in the Phoenix area for 20 years.

Bob Carroll joined the PopHealthMan team in July 2008 as the Executive Vice President of Business Development. Mr. Carroll’s 23+ years of leadership experience in the healthcare industry includes finance and operations management, Medicare and Medicaid, medical group management, information systems, project management, and business development.

Prior to joining PopHealthMan, Bob served as the Chief Operating Officer for a large multi-specialty medical group practice (160+ physicians, 1,200 employees) that provides services to approximately 150,000 patients, including 34,000 Medicare Advantage members. He was responsible for the overall performance of the group including quality of care, service levels, and financial results. In addition, Bob led the process of converting the group from hard copy medical records to more efficient electronic health records.

Bob earned his MHS degree from Arizona State University, and a BS degree from the University of Arizona.

Phil Schroeder is the Senior Director of Application Development for PopHealthMan, and has 35 years of systems development experience in a variety of businesses, including transportation, manufacturing and healthcare. He has been developing, implementing, and maintaining relational database, client server, and Visual Basic applications for over 20 years, and has developed a wide array of business applications in inventory control, bill of materials, and forecasting.

For the last 9 years, Phil has consulted exclusively for a large health plan in the MAPD division. He has developed systems that incorporate CMS data feeds such as MMR, TRR, MOR, and BILL for risk adjustment, hospice payments, eligibility, pharmacy, and quality control.

Phil has a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from the University of Illinois and he and his wife live in the Phoenix area.

Paul is the Database Manager and a lead programmer at PopHealthMan. He brings 15 years of technical sophistication with relational databases and application development that includes database design, structured query language, data mining, reporting, and business analysis. Having worked for a major managed care company and a large hospital-based healthcare system, Paul has extensive experience with both the insurance and provider sides of healthcare.

Academically, Paul holds a Bachelors of Engineering from the Cooper Union College in New York City and Master’s degrees in Business and Healthcare Administration from Hofstra University on Long Island, NY.

Nicole is the Medicare Advantage Client Manager, and is responsible for customer and data support to all of PopHealthMan’s clientele. She also provides consulting services with an emphasis on enrollment, marketing, compliance, pharmacy data encounters (PDE), and risk adjustment. Nicole has 14 years of health plan operations experience with commercial, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid plans, and holds a degree in Health Care Management.

Prior to joining PopHealthMan, Nicole was the Enrollment Operations Manager for two Medicare Advantage Special Needs plans located in Maryland and Delaware.

Nicole resides in Mesa, Arizona, where she and her husband are busy raising their four young children.