Meet Our Founder
Meet Our
Founder
“Valerie believes that healthcare deserves better than quick fixes and buzzwords. It deserves thoughtful leadership, grounded strategy, and solutions that actually work in the real world. That's why she built 6QD — to help hospitals move forward with confidence, clarity, and a partner who understands the complexity of their world.”
About Valerie
Valerie Barckhoff has spent more than 30 years helping hospitals navigate complexity, transform revenue cycle operations, and adopt new technologies with clarity and confidence. Her career spans every corner of the healthcare ecosystem — from frontline financial analysis to executive leadership inside major health systems, national consulting firms, and a Fortune 5 enterprise.
She founded 6QD with a simple belief: Hospitals don't need more noise. They need better thinking.
Today, that belief shapes the way 6QD helps organizations modernize their revenue cycle, adopt RPA/AI/Agentic AI responsibly, and build sustainable automation programs that fit their size, maturity, and mission.
Career Path
A Career Built Across the Entire Healthcare Landscape
Valerie's experience is unusually broad — and that breadth is what makes her perspective so valuable to clients. She has served as:
Senior Financial Analyst
at Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA
Revenue Cycle Consultant
at Ernst & Young and Deloitte
Executive Director, Vice President, and COO
at Multiple health systems
Director of Revenue Cycle IT
at PwC
Vice President of Healthcare Consulting
at North Highland
Principal and Healthcare Advisory Leader
at Regional Professional Services Firm
CEO of SHOAR Health
at Focused on RPA/AI and cyber-resiliency
SVP of Revenue Cycle Transformation
at Optum
This combination — operational leadership + consulting depth + enterprise transformation — is rare. It gives Valerie a 360-degree understanding of how hospitals actually work, where automation fits, and what it takes to drive sustainable change.
A National Voice in Healthcare
Valerie is a frequent speaker, moderator, and educator at national conferences and forums:
- HFMA
- NAHAM
- HIMSS
- Becker's
- State hospital associations
- National summits and innovation forums
She has delivered more than 50 national presentations on topics ranging from RAC audits to bundled payments to AI/RPA adoption and cyber-resiliency.
Published Author & Podcaster
Her writing has appeared in:
- Healthcare Financial Magazine
- Becker's Hospital Review
- Georgia Hospital Association publications
- MDRN Magazine
She also hosts The Shift: RCM Talks, where she, Heather Dunn (CRO, Novant Health) and Bill Elkost (Keybridge Medical) explore the challenges facing today's healthcare leaders.
Leadership Defined By
Across her career, Valerie has been the person organizations trust when the stakes are high. Her leadership is defined by:
- Transparency
- Ethical decision-making
- Operational realism
- Strategic clarity
- Deep respect for the people doing the work
- A commitment to building capability, not dependency
These values shape every engagement at 6QD.
Origin Story
Why She Founded 6QD
After decades inside complex organizations, Valerie saw a pattern.
Hospitals were overwhelmed by technology choices, vendor noise, staffing shortages, and operational pressure — but what they lacked most wasn't tools. It was clarity.
She created 6QD to bring that clarity back.
The firm is built on the Six Questions Deep framework — a disciplined way of thinking that helps leaders slow down, challenge assumptions, and make smarter decisions about automation, operations, and strategy.
6QD exists to help hospitals:
- Modernize responsibly
- Automate sustainably
- Build internal capability
- Reduce risk
- Improve performance
- Think more clearly
And to do it in a way that respects their size, their constraints, and their mission.
A Recognized Leader
Long before automation became a buzzword, Valerie was helping hospitals redesign workflows, build governance, and adopt new technologies responsibly.
Her work has been recognized with multiple industry awards, including the VHA Financial Transformation Award and the CHI Net Revenue Enhancement Award.
Her Work Includes
- Designing an enterprise blueprint for the revenue cycle of the future
- Building Centers of Excellence across financial clearance, HIM, coding, billing, denials, and workforce automation
- Creating a federated automation model that accelerated adoption of RPA, AI, and Agentic AI
- Launching an enterprise automation portfolio with 100+ use cases
- Developing cyber-resiliency solutions for revenue cycle continuity
- Reducing OIG investigations, compliance programs, and risk-based consulting models
Connect with Valerie
Ready to bring clarity to your organization?
Whether you're navigating a complex transformation, evaluating automation, or looking for a strategic partner who understands healthcare from the inside — Valerie would love to connect.