Professional Story

In 2022 I went looking for a side table. I wanted solid wood, built to last, and what I found was mostly veneer, particleboard, and furniture designed to be replaced. So I built one myself. That frustration became Basenji Woodworking, crafting heirloom pieces that let the natural character of the wood do the talking.

It wasn't the first time I'd responded to a gap by building something from scratch. I spent the first six years of my career consulting with large hospital systems across the country, learning how the biggest and best-resourced organizations in healthcare operated.

In 2017, I made a deliberate choice to take that experience somewhere it was needed more. I joined Cerner's CommunityWorks organization because smaller, rural hospitals were navigating the same complex federal regulatory requirements as the major systems I'd been working with, but without anywhere near the resources to do it. I grew up in a small Kansas town and I understood those clients. Over the next five years I built the Quality Measures practice from the ground up, created the contracting models, wrote the playbooks, and served nearly 300 hospitals. The instinct is always the same: find the gap, build the solution, and don't cut corners getting there.

Areas of Expertise

Team Building & Leadership | I built the Quality Measures team at Cerner's CommunityWorks organization from the ground up and led them through a period of sustained, significant growth while keeping quality and accountability intact.

Strategic Planning & Execution | I build strategies with the operational infrastructure required to actually execute them, from contracting models to project playbooks to the teams trained to carry them out.

Scaling Organizations | I led a practice through 300% workload growth while maintaining team size, which means I understand the difference between scaling smart and scaling fast.

Process Documentation & Playbooks | Good documentation is the difference between an organization that depends on individuals and one that can grow without them. I have built both the frameworks and the culture to support it.

Operational Efficiency | Six Sigma Greenbelt certified and experienced at identifying where organizations are bleeding time, money, and energy on work that doesn't need to happen the way it's happening.

Regulatory Compliance & Complex Environments | Healthcare taught me how to translate dense, constantly shifting regulatory requirements into workflows real people can actually follow, a skill that transfers wherever complexity lives.

Quality Reporting & Measures | I built and ran the Quality Measures practice for nearly 300 CommunityWorks hospitals, which means I understand this space at a depth most consultants don't get close to.

AI Tools & Modern Workflows | I leverage AI tools practically and deliberately, using them to expand capability and output without losing the craft or the judgment that makes the work worth doing.

Successes

Built a Practice That Served Nearly 300 Hospitals Starting from scratch, I built the Quality Measures organization at Cerner's CommunityWorks, creating the infrastructure, playbooks, and team that served nearly 300 community hospitals through implementations, upgrades, and ongoing regulatory support.

Scaled Through 300% Workload Growth Without Proportional Headcount As the CommunityWorks organization grew, so did our workload. I kept the team lean and the quality high, absorbing triple the work through smarter processes, better documentation, and deliberate resource planning rather than simply hiring our way out of the problem.

Created a New Contracting Model for Quality Measures The existing contracting structure didn't fit the work we were doing, so I built a new one. The CommunityWorks Quality Measures contracting model I developed became the standard for how that work got scoped and delivered.

Led the Largest eCQM File Submission to CMS In the first year of the CMS Electronic Clinical Quality Measures program I led the largest file submission in the program's history, a milestone that required both technical precision and the ability to coordinate across a complex, high-stakes environment.

Created the Model for All Future eQualityCheck Implementations By bringing the largest Cerner client live on the eQualityCheck abstraction tool, I established the implementation model that every subsequent eQualityCheck project was built on.

Saved More Than a Full-Time Employee Per Year Through Smarter Upgrades By redesigning the yearly upgrade strategy for Quality Reporting settings across all CommunityWorks clients, I eliminated enough redundant work to save more than one FTE annually across the team.

Rebuilt Training From the Ground Up The existing training materials weren't working. I developed an entirely new format that improved comprehension, simplified maintenance, and meaningfully reduced the volume of support tickets the team had to handle.

Collaboration

I work best with organizations that are being asked to do hard things without a clear roadmap for how to do them. That usually means navigating regulatory complexity, building operational infrastructure that doesn't exist yet, or scaling faster than current processes can support. If your organization is under-resourced relative to what's being demanded of it, that's exactly the kind of problem I was built for. I work with businesses of all sizes, and for the right opportunity I bring that same thinking inside an organization full-time.