Professional Experience

Jason's assistants -- Theon and Kali -- hard at work in his conference room.

I have been a dual-career professional since the last millennium. One path has taken me down the road of healthcare quality management and analytics; the other, along the rocky shoals of independent writing, editing, and publishing.

I studied applied moral theory and quantitative political science at the undergraduate and graduate level at Western Michigan University. In addition, I received a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification through a white-label initiative with Spectrum Health, and I maintained a Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality credential from 2006-2024.

Information Management

For several different companies ranging in size from $2M to $180M in annual revenue, I have consulted as a virtual/contracted chief information officer, helping to set strategy around each company's IT platform, analytics strategy, identity management framework, and staffing competencies.
Oversaw the payroll systems for a large (now defunct) golf club.

Quality Management

Served for several years as a manager of quality improvement analytics for a health plan, with overall responsibility for reviewing prior-year HEDIS results to identify novel opportunities to improve outcomes or reduce unnecessary costs.
In an acute-hospital setting, I partnered with the Quality team in the development of standard quality tools (e.g., SPC, PDCA cycles, 5S, kanban boards) in nursing units.
In the automotive industry, I was a contracted consultant responsible for the company's documentation revision to conform to the original QS9000 (now IATF 16949:2016) standards, in advance of a major audit.

Revenue Analytics and Strategy

Led a team of nine analysts who managed front-end revenue cycle operations for a regional hospital system. Accountability included education, training, systems administration, and reporting for the scheduling, pre-registration, registration, and financial-counseling teams.
Spearheaded the development of The Revenue Cycle Scorecard, a monthly printed abstract of tables and trend graphs that covered the entire revenue cycle of a hospital system, from scheduling to details management.
Helped launch a hospital denial-management program.
Served as an external strategy consultant for several small- and medium-sized businesses, with a goal of optimizing revenue capture, reducing customer-acquisition costs, and identifying potential new customer and vendor markets.

Compliance Management

I've managed day-to-day compliance processes for several small businesses, including policy development and fraud investigations.
I've also managed regulatory compliance with healthcare regimes (HIPPA/HITECH) and data-sharing agreements among covered entities.

Ethics

See the Ethics page for more information about this part of my background.

Project and Process Management

Served as lead project manager and product owner for the 2016 HEDIS program for a Michigan-based health plan with (at the time) more than 700,000 covered lives. HEDIS is the annual accreditation process for health insurance companies; HEDIS scores determine, among other things, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement and star ratings. During my year running the program, we migrated the entire corporate codebase from PL/SQL to Informatica, changed engine vendors, and built a new chart-chase protocol using more than two dozen full-time contracted nurses – and still managed to beat prior-year scores and come in (just) under our $20M budget.
Served as the project manager of an open-source software initiative to create an interactive bot for Discord to support writers and writing communities.

Data Governance

As an analytics manager in the healthcare industry, I established the first set of departmental standards for code documentation, code review, repository management, metric definitions, standardized pick lists, and standardized data-access protocols.
Served as a metric steward for the corporate data dictionary.

Population Health Management

Co-author (curriculum developer) of a three-course certificate program in population health equity for a major U.S. university system.
Served as the main analytic in-house expert at a health plan for hospital readmissions, case-management ROI, renal-care pathways, and ADHD stimulant abuse.
Developed a novel program called "Zero Defects in Care" that partnered a health plan with a hospital system and a medical group to identify compliance with select USPSTF well-care guidelines and to definitively resolve no/null responses to best understand actual population trends. We developed a series of conditions to find patients who were "no" or "null" on a given metric for entirely valid reasons like insufficient member months, medical exclusions, or transgender conditions; those explanations were then baked out of the calculations to determine true non-compliance rates in the community.
I was one of three cohorts of learners at a health plan engaged in a model program leading to a private certificate in population health management. The program required 120 hours of classroom time based on the textbook Population Health: Creating a Culture of Wellness by Nash et al., followed by a four-month practicum that paired an analyst, a manager, and a medical director to solve a real-world/real-data public-health problem. Our three-person team devised a successful alternative physician-outreach initiative, driven by the health plan’s physician incentive program, to boost the overall childhood immunization rate of members in the Greater Detroit market by 10 percent in one year.
Served as evaluation stakeholder for the Readmission Mitigation Initiative of the Michigan Health and Hospital Association. The RMI covered all health plans in the state of Michigan.
Served as the primary in-house program evaluator for the high-risk maternal and infant health programs of a hospital system's community-wellness department.

Non-Profit Leadership

I co-founded, with my fiancé, the West Michigan Animal Foundation – a small organization dedicated to the humane rescue and appropriate husbandry of animals, but especially horses (mustangs), snakes, cats, and quail.
I serve as executive director of Lakeshore Literary Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to advancing the acumen of authors in the West Michigan and Upper Midwest markets.
Former board treasurer, Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters (later, Write616). As treasurer, I served as the fiscal officer for a Michigan Humanities Council grant.
Former board member, National Association for Healthcare Quality & Healthcare Quality Foundation. NAHQ provided significant annual governance training to all board members, led by an experienced association attorney.
Former board member, Michigan Association for Healthcare Quality.
Former board member, WIDR 89.1 FM.
Former executive assistant to the president, Frey Foundation. Received significant grant maker training through the Council of Michigan Foundations.

Journalism & Content Curation

See the Literary page for a reasonably comprehensive run-down of my experience as a print journalist and as a writer, editor, and project manager for several major online-media markets.

Retail/Sales

I own Jason's Books and Coffee, an independent used bookstore and coffee shop located in Wyoming, Michigan. The bookstore is branching into multichannel online sales as well as the original bricks-and-mortar storefront.
Through the WMAF, we make quail eggs and egg products for retail in niche venues, primarily pop-up markets. We own the supply chain from bird to sale.