The Johns Hopkins University - Carey Business School

Director - Quality Innovation at National Quality Forum (NQF)

Ellicott City, Maryland, United States

After nearly two decades of health quality and systems work in the hospital and ambulatory settings, I’m thrilled to join National Quality Forum as a Director on the Quality Innovation team. I'm leading the National Quality Partners™ Action Team to Co-Design Patient-Centered Health Systems, an initiative that engages national stakeholders in identifying best practices to build active partnerships with patients, families, and caregivers to improve quality and patient safety. Additionally, I am directing work related to identifying measure gaps and improvement opportunities for preventing C. diff in the community, as well as an initiative with CMS to improve EHR Data Quality Best Practices as they relate to the development, endorsement, and implementation of eCQMs.

National Quality Forum (NQF)

Director - Quality Innovation

In my role as Director of Orthopaedic Outcomes, I led all activities related to Patient Reported Outcomes Measures (PROMs) at the MedStar Orthopaedic Institute, a team comprised of some of the country's leading surgeons and researchers. My accomplishments included:•	Led a Patient Reported Outcomes program that had collected more than 200,000 patient responses at the time of my resignation•	Coordinated the use of approximately 2 dozen PROMs to capture patient reported outcomes across multiple orthopaedic subspecialties•	Implemented PDSA cycles to improve staff compliance with PROM processes from 64% to 87%, and patient compliance from 57% to 88%.•	Created a dashboard using clinical data from three disparate systems that presented weekly quality metrics to leadership•	Supported a group of orthopaedic surgeons across 6 hospitals, 2 ambulatory surgery centers, and 16 ambulatory care clinics•	Provided data for online, print, and hospital-based marketing campaigns that highlighted notable accomplishments, such as the fact that 98% of lumbar spine patients reported improved outcomes within the first year after surgery•	Consulted with residents, fellows and attending surgeons on research questions that relied on PROM data•	Pulled, cleaned, and helped analyze data for retrospective and prospective research projects on sports-related shoulder instability, cervical disc replacement, total ankle arthroplasty, bone marrow aspirate concentrate injections, and other studies•	Addressed problems or questions related to the OBERD outcomes system

MedStar Union Memorial Hospital

Director of Orthopaedic Outcomes

As a Performance Improvement Manager at MedStar Union Memorial and Good Samaritan Hospitals, I worked with almost every inpatient, ambulatory, and support service to address quality improvement initiatives that align with CMS, the CDC, the Joint Commission, and other oversight bodies. My accomplishments included:•	Improved compliance with Joint Commission standards and organizational policies by leading tracers and educational initiatives; efforts contributed to six successful Joint Commission surveys in autumn 2017: one hospital accreditation survey with no condition-level findings (an uncommon accomplishment) and 5 Disease Specific Care certification surveys•	Utilized control charts, run charts, Pareto charts, and other analytic tools to identify standards with high rates of non-compliance and assist with performance improvement activities•	Integrated clinical data from disparate systems into meaningful dashboards that presented the right information at the right time, resulting in increased satisfaction from key participants•	Led monthly Renal Dialysis Quality meetings with multi-disciplinary membership that included physicians, nurses, social workers, dieticians, and other staff•	Facilitated participation by Renal Dialysis in a CMS-mandated quality improvement project on reducing bloodstream infections; PDSA results and data reporting processes were highlighted as exceptional among all participating dialysis centers•	Tracked data on bloodstream infections, antibiotic administration, and other reportable Dialysis Events, and managed all reporting through the CDC’s NHSN system

Performance Improvement Manager

Health Care for the Homeless is an amazing organization, and I'm thrilled that I had the opportunity to be part of this team. My work here presented countless opportunities to achieve my career goal of building bridges between patient care, administration, and technology.•	Directed data-informed initiatives that resulted in significant quality improvements, including an 18-percentage-point decrease in uncontrolled diabetics and a 10-percentage-point improvement in colorectal screening between 2012 and 2015.•	Guided the transition from a single-person, accreditation-focused program to a four-person, improvement-focused program.•	Shifted cultural expectations around data, including the move from reactive annual reports to proactive monthly reports. Weekly provider-level data on SBIRT led to a 10-percentage-point improvement in one month.•	Acted as Interim Director of Health Informatics from January to July 2016 after advocating for the creation of this new department.•	Led the selection process for a population health management system; vendor white paper identified our implementation process as a best practice. •	Redesigned all quality dashboards to ensure information was accurate, transparent, timely, and understandable.•	Trained and presented to the Board of Directors on issues related to quality improvement and health informatics.•	Regularly presented highly-rated workshops on performance improvement to state, local, and national audiences. •	Served as an advisory panel member for the HITEQ Center, an initiative led by John Snow Inc. (JSI) to identify best practices in informatics and quality improvement at Federally Qualified Health Centers.•	Introduced IHI quality improvement methodologies to all staff members, with focus on the IHI concept of “What can you do by next Tuesday”.•	Led all Joint Commission activities.•	Advocated at local, state, and national levels for legislative reform that aligns with organizational priorities.

Health Care for the Homeless

Director of Performance Improvement

People’s Community Health Centers was a multi-site Federally Qualified Health Center that offered medical, behavioral health, and dental services to vulnerable populations in Central Maryland. My reliance on data -- and my insistence on using trustworthy data -- helped me to learn what I value most in my work and my organization. A few of my more valuable experiences were learning how FQHCs (Federally Qualified Health Centers) function, developing useful quality measures for decision making, and rediscovering that transparency is a crucial part of my work environment.•	Developed and maintained systems to track, monitor, and report data on productivity, capacity, volume, no-show rate, and other key performance indicators. Delivered KPIs and scorecards to C-suite and Board of Trustees.•	Led assessment / selection of automated appointment reminder system, leading to 5% improvement in show rate.•	Used data to address call center inefficiencies, with early efforts showing KPI improvements of up to 25%.•	Presented to internal and external audiences from diverse cultural, educational, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

People's Community Health Centers

Quality Analyst

Hopkins is an amazing place to learn about health care, and I consider myself privileged to have worked here. I started out as a developer for a homegrown EMR system, helped implement an Allscripts EMR system throughout the inpatient services, and led the IT team that moved inpatient Psychiatry from paper to EMR. While the technical side of this work was not my passion, the analytical side was fascinating. I constantly had opportunities to meet clinicians, listen to their frustrations, and collaborate on better solutions. I'm not sure anything was more satisfying than receiving a grateful phone call from a physician who, thanks to the system I developed, was spending a weekend with his kids instead of documenting his clinic notes.•	Led IT team that successfully transitioned the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences from paper-based documentation to EMR.•	Co-designed and implemented a business process redesign that was quickly embraced by clinicians across 6 units in a leading 100-bed inpatient psychiatric academic center.•	Designed, developed, tested, implemented, and/or maintained multi-disciplinary documentation tools for hospital-wide inpatient and outpatient services, including medicine, surgery, neurology, OB/GYN, and pediatrics.•	Designed, developed, and implemented customized clinical documentation templates, resulting in cost savings of over $3M and efficiency increases up to 70%.•	Facilitated multi-disciplinary teams to ensure all deliverables met clinical, financial, administrative, and regulatory requirements. •	Analyzed projected quality improvements for Joint Commission Core Measures for Acute Myocardial Infarction, Heart Failure, and Pneumonia.

Johns Hopkins Hospital

Programmer/Analyst

Burnett Group is a world-class shop based in Manhattan that gave me an opportunity to work on projects for firms like Medco, JP Morgan Chase, and Honeywell. They have a strong commitment to high-quality work, and even after I left New York for Baltimore, I freelanced for them for many years. This is where I got my first taste of mission-oriented work, when I jumped into learning the then-emerging field of web standards and web accessibility for the disabled.

Burnett Group

Web Developer

This was my breakthrough into non-retail work, and it's a job that changed my life. These were the early days of web development, and I spent my days hand-coding HTML and optimizing images for 28.8k modems. (If you remember those, take a moment to celebrate how far we've come!) My first client was AT&T, so it was a crash-course on learning quickly and consistently delivering strong work.

Chuck Amos