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Chris DeMars Joins OHA’s Transformation Center

June 5, 2013 -- Chris DeMars has accepted a new position as Director of Systems Innovation with the Oregon Health Authority's Health System Transformation Center. She spent most of the past eight years with the Northwest Health Foundation managing the Foundation’s healthcare reform focus area.
June 5, 2013

June 5, 2013 -- Chris DeMars has accepted a new position as Director of Systems Innovation with the Oregon Health Authority's Health System Transformation Center. She spent most of the past eight years with the Northwest Health Foundation managing the Foundation’s healthcare reform focus area.

The Transformation Center will help coordinated care organizations achieve the goal of better health, better care and lower costs, and help spread the coordinated care model to other payers through technical assistance and learning collaboratives that foster peer-to-peer sharing of best practices among CCOs and other health plans and payers.

“I am excited to help Oregon achieve its vision of health for all Oregonians by applying a core Northwest Health Foundation guiding principle—that health is more than healthcare—through fostering integration between the healthcare system and the myriad factors beyond medical care that promote health,” DeMars told her colleagues. “In my new role, I’ll be managing the Transformation Center's Innovator Agents and learning collaborative and subject matter expert staff; liaising between the Center and other OHA programs; and supporting relationships between internal and external stakeholders.

“I am proud to have spent so many years at the Northwest Health Foundation, an organization that plays a vital role in the promotion of issues such as health equity, public health, and the social determinants of health. In fact, NWHF is experiencing its own transformation of sorts, with the upcoming release of its new strategic plan framed around the idea that healthy “beginnings” — prenatal through youth — are necessary to achieve healthy communities across the lifespan. I look forward to working with the Foundation in my new role.”

For more information about the Transformation Center, click here.

Image for this story courtesy of the Northwest Health Foundation.

Diane Lund-Muzikant can be reached at [email protected].

Comments

Submitted by Tina Castañares on Wed, 06/05/2013 - 12:04 Permalink

As the chair of the board of the Northwest Health Foundation, I want to say how proud we are of Chris DeMars and her new position. She is uniquely qualified for it and will no doubt bring great value as Director of Systems Innovation, just as she brought such value through her competence, insights, powers of analysis and convening skills to the Foundation. Congratulations to Chris, to the Transformation Center, and to the OHA overall!