Leading the Mission: Dominique Phillips on Putting People Before the Task

Dom Phillips knows how easy it is for operations to become a numbers game.

There are patients supported, cases completed, claims processed and goals to hit. As TailorMed's Vice President of Service Operations, those numbers are part of her world every day. She looks across clients to understand where teams are succeeding, where there are pain points and where there are opportunities to do more. She is also helping build the team itself during a period of rapid growth, while partnering across product, implementation and leadership to prepare for what comes next.

But Dom has spent enough time in operations, and enough time learning what it means to lead people well, to know the numbers can never become the whole story.

For Dom, the work connects two things she cares deeply about: building high-performing teams and making sure the work those teams do ultimately makes life a little easier for the patient on the other end.

Building the human side of patient support

Dom joined TailorMed with more than 15 years of healthcare experience, much of it rooted in pharmacy and patient support services. She has also spent much of her career in operations and in the startup world, where building teams, processes and infrastructure during periods of growth became familiar territory.

TailorMed offered an opportunity to apply that experience to a different part of the medication journey, at a company built as the Medication Success Platform: working to make sure every patient who is prescribed a medication can get it, afford it and stay on it.

As Vice President of Service Operations, Dom leads teams that include financial navigators, copay claims processors and patient support representatives. Their work becomes especially important when hospitals and clinics do not have enough internal resources to manage financial assistance proactively.

In those situations, TailorMed's service team can become an extension of the organization. They help identify patients who may qualify for assistance, support enrollment and follow those patients through the claims journey.

For Dom, that makes the connection between operations and TailorMed's mission unusually direct.

The more effectively her team works, the more patients they can help move past affordability barriers that might otherwise add another source of stress to an already difficult healthcare experience.

"It's not just about numbers," Dom says. "Every transaction that you look at, there's a patient behind it who's already had to deal with the barriers in other areas."

That perspective has made building TailorMed's service operations organization more rewarding than she expected.

Learning a new side of a familiar industry

Despite more than a decade and a half in healthcare, joining TailorMed also gave Dom the chance to become a student again.

Her background was heavily rooted in pharmacy. At TailorMed, she began digging more deeply into revenue cycle management on the medical benefit side. It was a reminder of just how many different worlds exist within healthcare.

Rather than approaching that learning curve as something to hide, Dom leaned on the expertise already around her. She credits her team with bringing years of experience that helped her connect her own pharmacy and operations background with a new understanding of the medical benefit.

At the same time, she was learning TailorMed itself: its customers, its teams and the needs of new clients coming into the organization during a significant period of growth.

For someone who likes to move quickly, that process has required a little patience.

"It's a marathon, not a sprint," she says.

Still, building is familiar territory for Dom. She has spent much of her career in operations, and the opportunity to help expand a growing part of TailorMed feels less like starting over and more like applying what she has learned in a place where the outcome carries a different kind of weight.

Learning to lead herself first

Some of Dom's most important lessons about leadership came much earlier in her career.

As a young leader, she was highly task-driven. She wanted to execute, solve the problem and keep moving. What she did not always recognize was how her own approach affected the people around her.

Then someone pointed it out.

That moment forced Dom to develop something she now considers fundamental to good leadership: self-awareness.

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For Dom, that meant becoming more conscious of her tone, thinking more carefully about how she showed up in meetings and learning not to react simply because something needed to get done quickly.

Over time, her instinct shifted from task first to people first.

The task still matters. Dom is an operations leader, after all. But she learned that acknowledging the person responsible for that task makes her better at leading both.

"Behind every title is a person," she says. "They have a reason that they're here. I have a reason I'm here. But we're all here for the patient."

It is a philosophy that now shapes how she manages her own teams and mentors other leaders.

Life beyond operations

Dom brings plenty of energy to the hours outside work as well.

She and her husband have two children and her niece, and somehow, amid work and family life, she still manages to read three or four books every month. She prefers physical books and will happily trade a night of television for reading, although that occasionally turns into staying up until 2 a.m. because she needs to know how the story ends.

She has also completed three HYROX fitness races and she and her husband spent 15 years as youth pastors. She knows some sign language. She studied Japanese hiragana in college.

Taken together, those pieces reveal something that also comes through in the way Dom talks about work. She likes learning. She likes building. And she likes people.

Only a few months into her time at TailorMed, she is bringing all three to a service operations organization that is growing alongside the company.

There will be metrics to watch, teams to build, clients to support and plenty of tasks to complete along the way. Dom will be paying attention to all of them.

She'll also be making sure her team remembers who is behind every one.

Dom’s story is one thread in a much larger fabric at TailorMed, one where the mission of moving mountains for patients shapes not just the work teams do, but how the people behind it choose to lead.