Biography

Improving care is never easy. But Katie Coleman, MSPH, is finding strategies that make it easier to integrate what's known about how best to care for patients into daily practice. As the Director of KPWHRI's Center for Accelerating Care Transformation (ACT Center), Ms. Coleman gathers knowledge about optimal ways to deliver, organize, and improve health care — and translates it into practice within Kaiser Permanente Washington, and in community health centers, public hospitals and small private practices. She focuses especially on elevating the quality of primary care and behavioral health for patients and providers.

Within Kaiser Permanente Washington, she is working with care delivery leaders to cultivate curiosity and bring research to their priorities by evaluating new capital investments, leveraging big data to improve care, and using implementation science and quality improvement methods to accelerate translation of evidence-based care.  

In the community, Ms. Coleman also designs and evaluates large scale improvement efforts in partnerships with patients, staff, and clinicians. Currently, she’s leading the primary care practice improvement arm of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Delta Center for a Thriving Safety Net initiative, which aims to advance value-based pay and care competencies in 12 state behavioral health and primary care associations.  She recently worked to improve care in a diversity of practices in the Colorado Health Foundation’s Team-based Care Initiative, in 65 community health centers in 5 states as part of the Commonwealth Fund’s Safety Net Medical Home Initiative and 250 small practices as part of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Evidence NOW initiative.  

Ms. Coleman speaks often and publishes her work in peer-reviewed papers, policy briefs, and white papers.  She recently published a report clarifying the core competencies of high-performing primary care and their intersection with value-based pay. She has contributed to early work evaluating the Kaiser Permanente Washington Patient-Centered Medical Home demonstration and Oregon Primary Care Associations’ Empathic Inquiry initiative, aimed at identifying and addressing social determinants of health.

Prior to joining the ACT Center and Kaiser Permanente, Ms. Coleman managed the strategic planning and government grants portfolio for Access Community Health Network, the nation’s largest network of community health centers.