Courtney Matteson
Courtney Matteson is a healthcare and academic medical education leader with more than 25 years of experience across healthcare finance, operations, and strategic program development. She currently serves as Manager at Germane Solutions, where she supports a national portfolio of academic medical centers, community health systems, and physician specialty programs. Over the past three years, her work has focused on academic medical consulting, helping organizations strengthen workforce pipelines, develop and expand graduate medical education (GME) programs, and maintain compliance with accreditation and regulatory standards. Matteson holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting and is pursuing a Master of Business Administration focused on business leadership.
In her consulting role, Matteson partners with healthcare organizations across the United States to build sustainable medical education infrastructures and strategic training pipelines. Her work includes helping institutions design new residency and fellowship programs to expand clinical capacity, optimizing operational structures to maximize funding and learner support in a compliant manner, and advising leadership teams on early-stage strategy and partnership development. Working with clients across multiple time zones—from the East Coast to the Midwest and West Coast—she manages a fast-paced schedule focused on aligning educational programs with institutional goals and long-term workforce needs.
Prior to joining Germane Solutions, Matteson served as Associate Vice President for Medical Education at Nuvance Health, where she oversaw learning services across seven hospitals in the Hudson Valley of New York and western Connecticut. One of her most significant accomplishments was leading the collaborative effort to launch 25 new residency and fellowship programs across the system, guiding them from initial concept to fully operational training programs with graduating physicians entering clinical practice in their communities. Matteson began her career in the accounting and finance side of healthcare, working in hospital billing and financial operations while completing her education. Although she initially planned a career in corporate finance, growing up in a family of nurses ultimately inspired her to pursue a path where she could contribute to improving community health through the advancement of healthcare education and workforce development.
• Advocating for Change in Your Organization
• Western Connecticut State University - BBA, Accounting
• Concordia Portland Alumni & Friends - MEd
• Walden University - MBA
• Food Pantry (local community)
What do you attribute your success to?
I would say it's my willingness and ability to just be a continuous learner. I've never tried to stop myself within any particular role. I'm always willing to learn more, to do more, to try a new project. Even here at Germain, I'm open to selling a new product or service line, just being very creative, very innovative, and open to learning and developing throughout the way. And it does help that I found a few key mentors and champions throughout who really helped push me forward, particularly in the health system space where that can be a little bit more challenging to do. My mentor, Dr. Denberg, really has such a wealth of knowledge about healthcare. He's a pediatrician by training who now works in the medical education space full-time, and he was able to support not only my education but gave me opportunities to be in the bigger rooms and the bigger spaces so that my voice could be heard. Even though we don't work together anymore, we still stay in touch on the regular, so he's just one of those people.
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Probably that would have to be just be very planful and thoughtful with your time, so in the frame of know what to prioritize and when to prioritize it. Sometimes that's going to be work come first, sometimes that's going to be family comes first. But figure out how to strike the balance so that you're not feeling burnt out on either side. And, you know, from time to time, obviously work's gonna take priority, other times family's gonna take priority, so just figuring out what works for you in delegating and prioritizing your time, because you can't be all the things to all the people all the time without it having an impact on your health. And that was the lesson I learned the hard way.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say a lot of it is just be willing to learn, because the medical education space is like its own other language in healthcare, but also you have to be brave, and you have to sort of fake it till you make it, be confident, so that you can demonstrate to all of the stakeholders, be they in a health system if you're working in health system medical education, or be them in the consultative space, that you know what you're talking about and can help guide them through this. We have great frameworks, and so really it's just being open to learning and then also building your own confidence level and finding your own mentors, sometimes who can be that Dr. Denberg to you, a champion, if you will.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
It all ties back to some of the federal priorities and federal funding changes. Right now, many of my clients and many of my colleagues' other clients are seeing funding reductions, funding restrictions, and not the level of support that maybe historically folks had had to expand healthcare, to do healthcare in an evidence-based way. A lot of it does come back to what is happening at the federal and state level and how the health systems have to respond to that. And they don't really have any way to predict it, which is unfortunate. So they're making a lot of changes on the fly that weren't in maybe that five-year strategic plan.
What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I definitely value a trusted partnership, and that's both personally and at work, so I never just want to be the person who's helping you move the cog throughout the wheel. I want to build a trusted relationship, I want to understand the why behind everything, so that we can make sure that we're building frameworks, pathways, personal development plans, you name it, in a way that makes the most sense for you, not necessarily just following the checklist, the framework, or keeping you inside a particular box.