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Headshot of Brian Payne, Founder and CEO of Torchlight

Brian Payne

Founder and CEO

Brian has been in public service for his entire career, serving as a first responder, healthcare leader and emergency manager. A sought after conference speaker, he has successfully led community planning exercises for hundreds of agencies. Over the past five years, he has developed a new model for delivering high-quality functional and tabletop exercises to healthcare facilities that meet their federal requirement at a fraction of the cost of a traditional training exercise. Most importantly, he understands the unique calling of the healthcare profession–not just to make a living but to serve the living! 

 

For more than two decades, Brian has been a licensed medical professional, responding to thousands of emergency calls, tornados, fires, hazardous materials incidents, technical rescues, and nationally declared emergencies, including Hurricane Katrina.

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From 2005 to 2018, Brian worked for a Healthcare System, of which most of his tenure was in a leadership position with their ambulance service.   Over his 13 years of employment, he helped this service grow into the largest ambulance service in the region, supported and developed city and countywide contract proposals, successfully configured and deployed ambulance operations into newly contracted areas, and actively participated in community planning spread across two states and five counties.  

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Additionally, as an accredited Emergency Manager, Brian Payne has served a local Emergency Management Agency in Iowa for more than 5 years, most recently as the County’s Emergency Management Coordinator.  During his tenure, the county has been impacted by three federally-declared disasters and dozens of local emergencies.  As a result of his leadership, he has been asked to speak at multiple conferences across Iowa and Illinois to discuss his experiences, most notably the methodology for his assisted functional and tabletop exercises. 

 

The core foundation of these services being offered have been successfully provided to hundreds of healthcare agencies over the last several years. In the words of those local partners for the services being offered, "They have been invaluable."  

 

Lastly, Brian has personally cared for loved ones suffering from declining health with dementia and other illnesses that required several specialties throughout the healthcare industry to help meet their needs.

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Personally, he believes that he was put on this earth not just to make a living but to serve the living!

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