Her first job out of college was at a nursing home in Washington State — one in the middle of a regulatory crisis. They called it the War Room: giant Post-it notes covering every wall, citations everywhere, everyone scrambling. Buffy walked in, looked around, and felt something click. This was exactly the kind of work she was meant to do.
She was right. She got her Nursing Home Administrator license, took over her first facility — poorly run, losing money, unhappy staff, poor care — and turned it around. Then she did it again. And again. For fifteen years at the same company, she was the person they moved from facility to facility once the work was done. Fix one, move to the next.
That pattern followed her everywhere she went. As a Regional Vice President at a national urgent care and workers' compensation company — her first move outside of long-term care — she inherited a failing multi-state region and turned it around, exceeding EBITDA targets by $14 million in a single year. At a five-clinic radiation oncology practice in Washington State, she stepped into a fragmented organization and built the infrastructure it had never had — centralized HR, compliance systems, and operational alignment across all five clinics — while improving culture, patient experience, and financial performance simultaneously. At a multi-site ophthalmology practice, she took the CEO seat, identified major revenue cycle failures, and rebuilt operations from the ground up — new practice management software, payroll systems, IT infrastructure, and financial controls — while stabilizing culture and delivering measurable cost reduction.
Sprinkled in was a stint leading value-based care initiatives — not a turnaround, but an experience that gave her deep expertise in alternative payment models, Medicare strategy, and payer dynamics that is indispensable for any healthcare organization navigating today's reimbursement landscape.
The throughline across 25 years and every organization: she didn't go looking for broken things. Broken things found her. And she has never once left one the way she found it.