Meet Angela Richardson, VNSNY’s 2020 Living Legend Award Winner!

The Phyllis Mills Living Legend Award, named after longtime VNSNY Board Member Phyllis Mills, honors a VNSNY employee who has been with the organization at least 10 years and who, through steadfast focus and effort, has made a significant contribution to VNSNY and its mission̦—establishing that employee as a VNSNY “living legend” in the tradition of the legendary Phyllis Mills herself.

In the following three Frontline profiles, you’ll have a chance to meet the remarkable 2020 winner of the Phyllis Mills Award, Angela Richardson, as well as this year’s two notable runners-up, John Billeci and Tim Peng.

2020 PHYLLIS MILLS AWARD WINNER

Angela Richardson, Home Health Aide, Partners in Care

A 39-year-veteran of Partners in Care, having started at the agency two years before it became part of VNSNY in 1983, Angela is one of VNSNY’s longest-serving staff members. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that Angela is always working. In fact, even during her interview for this profile, she was waiting for her current client, a wheelchair-bound dialysis patient, in front of Mount Sinai Hospital, before gently wheeling him out of the lobby, helping him from his chair and easing him into a car.

Angela’s first experience providing care to others was in her childhood home in Trinidad, where she helped tend to her elderly grandmother. At age 16, she moved to New York with her mother, who preceded her at Partners in Care by two years. In the course of Angela’s career as a Partners in Care home health aide, she has provided compassionate care to more than 400 clients.

When COVID-19 struck our region, Angela refused to let it get in her way: Valiantly navigating trains and buses to get to her clients, she didn’t take a single day off during the pandemic. In addition to caring for her regular client, she proactively reached out for extra shifts whenever she was available—a particular blessing during a time when many HHAs became unavailable due to illness or concern about potential exposure to the virus. “Patients need to be taken care of, and I’m prepared,” she says. “I do a lot of handwashing! I always carry my sanitizer and my cleanser and my PPE in my bag. I’ve never gotten sick, and I’m not afraid.”

Angela says she plans to keep going through 2027, at least, using her knowledge, history, compassion, and experience to influence and impact Partners in Care clients as well as her colleagues in the office. With her characteristic humility, she credits her Phyllis Mills Living Legend Award to her longevity at the organization and to her taking on extra shifts during the pandemic—but she is clearly moved by the honor.

“I love to look at the Phyllis Mills Award,” she says. “It has a beautiful blue in it, just like our uniforms. I have a wall unit in my living room with three angel figures on it, and that’s where I’m going to display the award, right in front of them.”

2020 PHYLLIS MILLS AWARD RUNNERS-UP

John Billeci, Director of Special Events

A dynamic fundraising advocate for VNSNY for the past 20-plus years, John brings his enthusiasm, creativity, and engaging personality to every initiative he takes on. Whether it’s envisioning a gala for VNSNY’s 125th anniversary or pulling together VNSNY’s popular annual golf tournament, John, with the invaluable help of Associate Director of Special Events Lauren Weir, consistently finds new ways to engage with donors and potential donors alike. Along the way, he has helped raised more than $26 million for the organization.

“Fundraising is an important part of promoting and sustaining the mission of VNSNY,” notes John. “I’ve spent all of my 20 years here trying to raise as much money as possible for our charitable care programs.”

This year, of course, COVID-19 threw a curve ball in terms of fundraising efforts. “When the pandemic hit our region, we had just mailed out invitations to the Golf Classic, which is usually held in May,” recalls John. “As the date of the event got closer, we ended up deciding to cancel it. Attempting a limited version of it didn’t make sense for us, and as a healthcare organization we didn’t think that promoting any kind of gathering was a responsible decision.”

As the pandemic lingered on, more in-person events had to be canceled as well, including VNSNY’s annual donor Gala scheduled for November. When that happened, John quickly pivoted to an elegant Virtual Gala—and kept the donations coming in. “When donors were hesitant, I explained that the goal of our events is to raise funds for VNSNY’s Coronavirus Response Fund, which is used to purchase PPE for our frontline staff, among other charitable programs,” he says. “Once they understood that, most people were happy to give, even if it was slightly less than prior years. It’s been a difficult year for everybody, but we were still able to meet our goals.”

An actor in his earlier life, John still makes use of the skills of the trade. “Putting on an event is a lot like putting on a show,” he says. “I’m also comfortable dealing with lots of different types of people in the way they want to be treated. As an actor, you learn to read people and you react to what you’re given—some people want you to hold their hand, some people want you to be succinct and as quick as possible, some people want you to be funny, and others don’t want humor. I’ve learned over time to understand what people want, and I think that’s helped me in my career.”

Tim Peng, Chief Data Analytics Officer

As the head of VNSNY’s 50-person Business Intelligence & Analytics team, Tim is responsible for supplying VNSNY’s leadership and clinical and operational teams with a broad range of essential, timely data, analysis, and guidance needed to fuel initiatives, drive business, and boost efficiency.

“My role really comes down to helping all levels of the organization get the information they need at the right time,” says Tim, a 22-year VNSNY veteran. “It’s not just about gathering data and throwing it back at them. We go through mountains and mountains of data generated from different systems across the organization to essentially find the needle in the haystack. Then we create an efficient way to present that information to the teams that will benefit from it, usually by integrating it into the systems that they use.”

That haystack needle might be a pattern that enables staff to flag a patient who’s at imminent risk for hospitalization, or a better way to manage chronic disease in clinically complex patient populations, or a contract-tracing tool that Tim’s team created to support VNSNY’s clinical staff at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. His team’s research also led to a vastly more accurate risk-adjustment payment model for Medicaid-managed long-term care plans that has significantly improved the New York State payment system.

The ultimate goal is to help other VNSNY staff members do their work effectively without having to crunch numbers themselves, explains Tim. “Clinicians and operational staff are busy doing their jobs—they don’t have time to sift through reams of data to anticipate what’s around the bend,” he says. “We identify the pertinent information from the data, put it in order, fine-tune it, and make it accessible and meaningful for them.”

Being a runner-up for the Mills Living Legend Award means a lot to Tim. “I never thought of myself as someone who’d be eligible for this award, and knowing that my peers nominated me for this is very moving. But it’s really my team that does all the work,” he says. “At the end of the day, my role is all about staying focused and supporting our mission—whether it’s working with operations to make them more effective, working with clinicians to better care for members, or working with government affairs on public policy that affects the people we serve. I’m so glad I started my career at VNSNY, which has offered me opportunity after opportunity to do meaningful work and to make a difference.”