April is Administrative Professionals Month, and at CAMP, it’s also a chance to spotlight the people who keep everything moving. We sat down with Jodi Calnan, CAMP’s billing and payroll coordinator, to talk about what it actually takes to coordinate physicists across multiple states, why no two schedules look the same, and what keeps her at CAMP.
Let’s start with your title and role at CAMP.
My title has been office manager, but that never quite fit. We don’t have an office, for one thing, and I don’t manage any employees. I’ve been more of a scheduling coordinator, and recently I started taking on invoicing to help Annie. So my new title is going to be ‘Billing and Payroll Coordinator,’ which reflects where things are heading.
How did you end up at CAMP?
I’ve known Kate since 2010. We met long before either of us were married or living fully adult lives, basically. I had spent years as an office manager for two separate medical clinics, and then COVID happened and I had young kids, so I stepped back for a while. When I was ready to go back to work, I was at a radiology site that CAMP actually services now. It was a good entry point for where I was at the time, but I wanted more. Kate let me know when the scheduling position opened up; I applied and got it!
I already had some sense of what CAMP did because one of the clinics I’d worked at was also an imaging center, and we had used CAMP for ACR accreditation. So I understood the basics of what medical physicists do. What I did not understand at the time was how much movement the scheduling side would involve!
Walk me through what a normal day actually looks like.
It usually starts with lots of email. I check what came in overnight and work from there. A big part of my day is scheduling for the medical physicist assistants, so locations like all the dental offices, veterinary clinics, and chiropractic offices on the diagnostic side. Most of that coordination happens over email because there are always questions about forms, due dates, and what clients need before the visit.
Then there’s travel. Some months it’s a lot of moving parts. Last month alone we had five travel trips running simultaneously between Brad Lofton, Nathan Busse, Mike Heard, and Jeff Gordley, who had two trips of his own. That’s when the day gets really layered, because I’m coordinating across multiple states, multiple hospitals, airlines, car rentals, and hotels. Jeff’s trips into the mountains are a good example of the complexity. He’s covering tiny towns with one or two inspections each, and I have to figure out how to sequence those inspections, account for mountain drive times, keep everything within business hours, and still land him at a decent hotel by the end of the day.
After emails and scheduling, I look at what else needs attention, whether that’s the next month’s calendar or invoicing. I do invoicing on Fridays because managers have to clear timecards by Tuesday, so the timing lines up.
You mentioned that you schedule differently for each physicist. What does that mean in practice?
Everyone approaches the work differently, so the scheduling has to match the person. Jeff is incredibly flexible and fast. I can put a few anchors on his calendar and give him a list of six more to work in, and he’ll handle it and be done in under two hours. He likes the control of grabbing it and going.
In contrast, Brad is different. He wants everything mapped out, eight to ten is this, ten to eleven is this. He wants it clear and sequential before he starts. So there’s a lot of back and forth depending on who I’m working with that day.
The honest challenge of growing is that it gets harder to scale that kind of individualized coordination. I currently handle the diagnostic side, but if CAMP expands significantly into more states, one person can’t manage the travel piece alone. Especially when you don’t know the geography. I lived in Colorado for a long time, so I know which roads are fine to drive in March. Montana was a different story. I kept running into areas with no hotels anywhere near where I was trying to send someone, and it took me a while to figure out it was because those areas are on Native American reservations. That’s the kind of local knowledge that just takes time to build.
What surprised you most about working here?
I thought I understood what CAMP did. You come in, do the inspection, check the equipment, and leave. What I did not expect was how far beyond that they actually go.
They’re not just doing inspections and submitting reports. They’re constantly looking at how to improve protocols, not just at one clinic but across the board. They’ll go into a hospital and say, ‘This protocol gets better patient outcomes, here’s why you should switch.’ They’re pushing to change things at an industry level, not just maintaining the status quo.
Just this morning, I was checking on a site and realized CDPHE had never processed last year’s report. Before I even reached out to the client to let them know their inspection was coming up, I was already emailing CDPHE to resolve it. Other companies would submit the report and wait for the client to figure out the rest. We’re tracking due dates, flagging things the client doesn’t even know to look for, and walking people through processes they’ve never dealt with before.
We see it on the dental side a lot. Dental offices have high turnover, so new office managers come in who have no idea about CDPHE or that their equipment even needs to be checked. CAMP catches that and helps them get it right.
What’s it like working with a team full of physicists?
Honestly, it surprised me in a good way. I expected more of that rigid, “one-two-three-can’t-flex” energy that I saw with some of the doctors I worked with in medical clinics. CAMP’s physicists are the opposite. They’re just incredibly down to earth. You would never guess the level of expertise in the room.
The flip side is that sometimes they’re so easygoing that someone has to push for a decision. I’ll be on an email chain with three or four of them and everyone is being very accommodating of everyone else’s opinion, and I’m thinking, I am not senior enough to make this call for you – someone please just pick something!
What keeps you here?
They make it possible to have a career and still be present for my kids. Anytime something comes up with my family, there’s never any pushback. It’s always, “What do you need? How can we help?” That’s rare. And even as CAMP crosses into being a genuinely big company, they’re staying true to that. Nobody here is just a number. They look at what the team and I are each good at, what we’re not, and they try to put the right tasks with the right people. They want everyone to thrive in their role, not just get through it.
That’s just hard to find.
