Madeline Ford

I'm a health systems engineer passionate about improving population health with a systems approach using data-driven decision making. I have experience in healthcare delivery, healthcare data analytics, managing agile software development, process and quality improvement, modeling and simulation, and public health problem-solving. I have strong leadership and communication skills. I enjoy collaborating with patients, clinicians, and health system leadership. My background is in Industrial and Systems Engineering. I focused on Healthcare Systems Engineering for my Master's degree. I wanted to learn about population health outside of the health system, so I started a part-time Master of Public Health program at Johns Hopkins. I am currently working at Henry Ford Health as consultant and project manager in the Revenue Cycle Department. I joined Henry Ford for the innovative culture and to learn about a new aspect of the health system (payment, insurance, and finance). I am excited to have an impact on our patients and organizational success in my day job and would appreciate the opportunity to make a difference in the fellowship, as well.

During my time as a health systems engineer working with the largest healthcare system in the world (Military Health System) and studying public health, my main conclusion was that the healthcare system is broken for patients. I've worked on continuous improvement in the healthcare delivery and financial spaces, but I believe that incremental improvement is not enough. Innovation in the healthcare space will bring us closer to the ideal state for patients, clinicians, and health system as a whole. We simply don't have enough time to incrementally improve the health system, we need revolutionary innovation to speed up the process and move towards a system that works best for patients and providers.