Chief People Officer: Dana Streck

PUBLISHED JANUARY 2025

Across the Kansas City region, across the nation and even around the world, there are people whose first step to career achievement came on a trail blazed by Dana Streck. As a vital cog in the hiring process at the former Cerner Corp., she was instrumental in fueling employee growth from 5,000 to nearly 27,000 at its peak. 

In 2018, she left to join a far smaller yet equally ambitious healthcare tech company that would soon rebrand as WellSky. From 400 employees to nearly 3,000 today, she’s been intimately involved in not just building the frame for a workforce, but pouring the foundation for an emerging corporate culture.

It all started with a focus on the outcome and then on creating the processes to reach it. 

A few months after she came on board at Mediware Information Systems, it rebranded as WellSky, but much more than the signage was changing. 

“In setting the vision for the company, where we wanted to go within post-acute care, what role we wanted to play, we intentionally did that with culture,” Streck says. “Rebranding did two things: One, it reset who we would be to the market and to clients, telling a simpler story to them about our goal and vision. It also allowed us to internally build that culture and put in place three promises to frame it for teammates, for clients and for the community.”

Teammates—they are not “employees”—are taught from Day One to view their work through all three lenses, with defined behaviors and set expectations, she says. “I took that from Cerner, that intentionality and understanding of what it takes to create a great culture.”

That culture helped drive performance; revenues went from $297 million in her first year there to $732 million in 2023 (the books haven’t been closed on 2024 yet). Much of that growth has flowed through a pipeline that increasingly yields more interest from qualified candidates rather than having to pull them in on the front end, she says. And a fair amount has come from the acquisition of some 15 companies over that span, each of which had a culture that had to be adjusted to mesh with the one her team was charged with creating.

“It helps that we’ve created a great company with great benefits, a great culture and our referral pipeline is huge with teammates,” she says; fully half of a recent newcomer class was made up of hires connected through team referrals. “And it’s not just Kansas City, but from remote teammates as well,” she says. “We’ve created a name for ourselves, a reputation as a good employer, and that definitely helps with recruiting. The pipeline is strong because of that.”

Streck’s affinity for a key component of her work—making new connections—runs all the way back to childhood. Originally from Wisconsin, she had to adjust to frequent moves while her father worked his way through the corporate ranks of companies like Oscar Meyer, Swift and Eckrich. She attended three high schools, with the final 18 months at Blue Valley in Overland Park.

“With that much change and having to meet new people as a teen and as a young child to fit in, I had to figure out early on how to build relationships,” Streck says. “I always say I had to be a chameleon of sorts, but having those experiences really helped in my career to relate to many individuals and their experiences to make connections. It also made me resilient and motivated me to overcome situations I’ve been put in that were out of my control and figure a pathway to ensure I could continue to be successful.”

Having worked with some of the biggest names in regional business leadership—Cerner co-founders Cliff Illig and Neal Patterson, and HR director Julie Wilson, along with WellSky CEO Bill Miller—Streck has had the rare career that truly impacts lives across multiple generations. What will her legacy be?

“I go back to my own mentors, what they provided me and how they influenced my career,” she says. “The best legacy I could leave behind is being that mentor or that person to others. I hope I’m influencing my leaders here to grow more and accelerate their path. The best compliment anyone can give me is that I helped advance their career and influenced them to take that next step.”