Beginning in 2020, our organization began to look critically at how to better support the Quality Improvement, Quality Assurance, and Data + Reporting needs for our organization. Since that time, Angie has shepherded Health Centers through an expansive change process to better meet both our current business needs as well as prepare us more strategically meet the goals of value-based payment and population health. Under her leadership, we have developed defined teams that focus on Quality Assurance, including risk, compliance, credentialing, and other QA functions to standardize processes and increase communication and transparency around this body of work. In addition, she has helped develop a robust Quality Improvement team that is embedded within every level of primary care operations, utilizes clear project planning tools and processes, and clearly links to overall organizational vision and strategy. Our QI teams and EMR Analysts operate with much more direct communication to clinic leadership and the teams that rely on them, we have developed common language and tools for coordinating work, and we finally feel as though we operate as a more unified team.

Under Angie’s tenure as Deputy Medical Director for Clinical Quality, we have advanced significantly as an organization that values and prioritizes data-driven decision making and working from a place of common understanding around the evolving payment and quality landscape we work in here in Oregon. She has linked CCHC with the Southcentral Foundation to help build a model for effective data stewardship and data access that will allow leadership and end users to access information we need more nimbly and with better understanding of what the data represents and how we get it. It’s a tremendous undertaking that reflects both organizational vision and her humility and service orientation as a leader to forge forward through the challenges of this work—that fundamentally forces organizational introspection and integration.

One of the things I value most about her is her willingness to ask for and seek clarification regarding the complexities of VBP and the evolving quality and financial landscape CHCs are operating within so that we all understand and can work better through change and growth as an organization. Angie listens and communicates always from a place of wanting to promote transparency, encourage organizational alignment, and most importantly, use strategic planning, data, and clear project planning to promote excellent care for the communities we serve. It’s an honor to work alongside and learn from her.

From left to right: Joan Watson-Patko, Shanta Frisbee, Silver Marquez, Jason Villanueva, Penny Pritchard, Ruth Ann McGovern, Angie Amundson, and Andrew Suchocki