Episode 46 | Hire an 18-Year-Old at $17 an Hour to Run Your Lobby

September 23, 2026

Community Health Collective

Host: Jill Steeley

EPISODE OVERVIEW

Jill calls it the Self-Checkout Hire - and it started with her 18-year-old son, who makes $17 an hour at Lowe's mostly helping people through self-checkout. Meanwhile, health centers are paying nurses, MAs, and front-desk staff to do the same kind of work by phone: portal signups, check-in, password resets, and rescheduling. In this solo episode, Jill makes the case for putting one young, tech-fluent person in your lobby and exam rooms whose whole job is getting patients onto the portal and scheduling themselves, walks through the five jobs of that role, runs the math on what it frees up, and names the prerequisite most centers skip - templated provider schedules. Then she flips the conversation: online scheduling isn't a nice-to-have anymore, and the belief that patients don't have a choice is a myth health centers can't afford. This one's for CEOs, COOs, and practice managers who are tired of watching licensed staff play phone tag.

Highlights:

Why Lowe's puts a $17-an-hour employee next to the self-checkout - and what health centers can learn from it
The hidden cost of licensed staff doing portal signups, password resets, and rescheduling by phone
The 5 jobs of the Self-Checkout Hire: greet and enroll, teach self-scheduling, be the help desk, speed up check-in, and track the number
The rough math: about $44K a year, fully loaded, versus the licensed hours you get back
Why templated schedules are the gate to patient self-scheduling
The captive-patient myth - and why patients who want to book at 7:30 at night will go somewhere that lets them

Quotes from the episode:

"Here's the thing, none of those tasks requires a professional license to help with."

"When your most expensive people spend their day on ten dollar tasks, you end up paying for it twice... because nobody went to nursing school to reset passwords."

"I call it the captive patient myth, the belief that patients will put up with whatever we offer because they have nowhere else to go."

"This work is really hard, but some of the best fixes are simpler than we think. Sometimes it's just a friendly person standing next to a machine helping a patient."

Mentioned in This Episode:

FQHC CEO Connect Bootcamp. A 5-month program that helps you build a profitable, reputable health center easier and FASTER than figuring it out alone. Enrollment is now open: www.fqhc-ceo.com
Get in touch with Jill: [email protected] or schedule a call with her here.

The Community Health Collective — honest conversations about the real barriers keeping health centers stuck, and what it takes to get unstuck. If this episode helped, share it with another community health leader. That's how we grow this collective, one connection at a time.