Vice President of Innovation, Impact & Learning at Centering Healthcare Institute

About Centering Healthcare Institute

Centering Healthcare Institute is a non-profit organization that collaborates with healthcare providers across all sectors to transform healthcare. Our mission is to improve health, transform care, and disrupt inequitable systems through the Centering group model. We empower patients, strengthen patient-provider relationships, and build communities through three main components: health assessment, interactive learning, and community building.

We are dedicated to creating a future where the risk of preterm birth, the inequities faced by Black women in pregnancy-related outcomes, and the disparities in early childhood are significantly reduced—ensuring that every child has the potential to enjoy better life chances, social and economic opportunities, and overall well-being. With over two decades of experience as the leading resource for group care, we have developed and sustained the Centering model in nearly 500 practice sites and some of the largest health systems in the world.

For more information about our mission and work, please visit www.centeringhealthcare.org. 

About the Opportunity
Centering Healthcare Institute is embarking on a new strategic plan, for the next three years, in service of a longer-term goal of increasing access to Centering for all, and particularly for vulnerable populations who face the greatest disparities in outcomes and access. The plan is focused on testing and learning to develop a pathway to significant scale for Centering and building a strong organization to achieve that scale. Under new and growing leadership, and with significant philanthropic investment, this an exciting opportunity to join the team as we build the organization and imagine the next chapter of growth and impact for CHI. We are looking forward to welcoming passionate, adaptive leaders who are eager to roll up their sleeves and engage in this collaborative, co-creative process.

We’re seeking a dynamic, highly-motivated research, data, evaluation, and impact professional who can lead CHI in building critical learning and innovation capabilities the organization will need to support both the impact of Centering and our ability to increase the scale and impact of Centering.

This opportunity to test the services and approaches to scale Centering long-term is supported by decades of implementation and a robust evidence base, particularly for CenteringPregnancy, so currently, more traditional research and evaluation practices are not the core focus for the organization. Instead, this next chapter will require CHI to continue building behaviors and practices to effectively share information internally, innovate on its services and practices, and take on a nimble, adaptive mindset necessary to evolve as an organization and enable long-term scale. Like many organizations working within the healthcare and nonprofit space, CHI has also navigated challenges in effectively collecting data from healthcare settings, such that the organization can track fidelity of Centering sites and inform updates to CHI’s offerings to ensure impact at scale, though the organization has made good progress through recent pilots. Alongside learning and innovation practices, the next three years will be a critical opportunity to refine CHI’s understanding of what data is most critical to collect and how, with attention to the evolving healthcare landscape.

This is a unique opportunity to propel CHI forward in its research and data capacity by ensuring the design and implementation of a coordinated and comprehensive strategy to measure the impact of our model and ensure that the organization deepens and broadens its influence. The Vice President of Innovation, Impact & Learning will, in the near term, report to the Chief Experience Officer and Chief Executive Officer. 

Areas of Leadership 

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to excel in each of its essential functions. Centering Healthcare Institute’s first-ever Vice President of Innovation, Impact & Learning brings experience and a passion for leadership in the following areas which are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these functions. 

Mission and Vision

• Be a champion for improving health, trans­forming care, and disrupting inequitable sys­tems through the Cen­ter­ing group model
• Demonstrate commitment to and knowledge of CHI’s priority focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging and its values of advancing high-quality, evidence-based group care; creating an environment that inspires relationships of collective power in the health system; and disrupting the structures and systems that drive poor health to co-create communities where everyone has an equitable opportunity to thrive

Culture Change and Relationship Building

• Provide leadership on and drive culture change internally around learning, innovation, and using data effectively across the organization, including an adept understanding and practice around supporting the fluctuating morale and stages of innovation work while building trust with teams and colleagues throughout innovation processes
• Build innovation structure internally and support innovation initiatives in setting up teams and processes with the right cross-section of skills, levels, and identities
• Facilitate change management as CHI adopts new innovations, including managing stakeholders and coaching internal program leads and senior leadership through adoption of new practices
• Partner with key staff, i.e Chief People & Culture officer and the Diversity & Equity and Engagement teams on change management efforts

• Oversee and support implementation of organization-wide practices for learning and innovation, with a near-term focus on quality improvement of CHI’s services that can also be scaled
• Guide internal teams to shared goal and strategy setting and support teams to overcome obstacles through the innovation process and make decisions about trade-offs
• With additional capacity from a team member, this will include developing tools / processes for capturing and sharing information across the organization and developing approaches for testing and learning cycles for new or adjusted services for sites and health systems (e.g., small-scale piloting of new ways to help sites implement Centering
• Oversee organizational learning about the external landscape (e.g., support market scans to understand competitors offering group care, stay apprised of changes in the data / technology landscape in partnership with the head of digital technology
• Disseminate learnings from initiatives ensuring that learnings are documented and socialized both internally and externally as applicable

Impact Measurement

• Oversee and support the evaluation of CHI’s impact, which will be implemented by other team members, including (near-term) coordination with those collecting site data and providing analytical support to draw insights from available site data (e.g., accreditation data) and also including connections with the Practice Transformation, Development, Contracts and IT departments
• In partnership with other staff, take part in supporting a critical implementation evaluation over the next three years to inform the core services needed to support fidelity to the model at scale (e.g. informing the scope of work, and selecting and liaising with an external consultant supporting evaluation work to support CHI’s strategic priorities)
• In time, develop a longer-term plan for measuring CHI’s impact as the organization and model scales, with a focus on data strategy and infrastructure at CHI (e.g. identifying a) what data will be needed to track fidelity to the model as well as inform continued innovation, and b) what personnel, systems, and/or tools will be needed to support impact at scale)

• Manage and lead the new Learning, Impact & Research team; determine the right team structure and necessary professional skills required
• Cultivate a learning environment in which experimentation and evidence-based reform are highly valued, including providing technical consultation to teams undertaking learning and
• evaluative efforts to help them think through the purpose of their learning goals and their key questions, methodology, and use for the future
• Develop new policies, procedures, manuals, training, and toolkits around data best practices and processes, including teams’ strategies for disseminating learning to key audiences and analyzing trends in the program portfolio for lessons to share internally and externally
• Collaborate with the Vice President of Digital and Technology, and the Development team, on critical data, impact, and research decisions, as well as support all data collection, reporting,  and contractual obligations for grants and funding
• Provide leadership, with the Vice President of Digital and Technology, around any future data migrations or system considerations related to data management, analytics, modeling, dashboards etc.

• At least 8-10 years of executive level non-profit leadership, working with Black birthing communities or Medicaid-qualifying populations in FQHCs or major healthcare organizations
• 3-5 years of experience working in healthcare data collection and management are preferred but not required, including work healthcare innovation, traditional research and approaches to learning, evaluation, and measurement
• Experience with accelerated research, data leadership, program and impact evaluation, and/or qualitative, quantitative, and participatory research
• Experience with data equity and use of data and research within communities of color, including a demonstrated understanding of how structural racism is present in the evaluation field and of the unique barriers to data collection efforts in healthcare
• Experience leading quality improvement efforts to refine program offerings
• Experience with innovation frameworks (e.g., lean impact, design sprints, rapid prototyping)
• Data analytics experience with a proven ability to leverage data to inform decisions
• Entrepreneurial, collaborative, and comfortable working across teams
• Skilled in change management
• Experience with processes and tools to ensure a best-in-class learning organization 
• Excellent communication to grow the interpersonal relationships that create a fluid work culture
• Proven experience building out a new department, including new systems, strategy, and process flows, with exceptional leadership, management, supervisory, and coaching/mentoring skills
• Brings a collaborative and flexible style, with a strong service mentality; a team player who is committed to continuous professional development for themselves and their staff
• Helpful, but not required, to have experience in a startup environment and creatively leveraging lean resources

Salary, Benefits & Location

The starting salary range for the Vice President of Impact & Learning role is $160,000-170,000, based on the qualifications and number of years of relevant experience the selected candidate brings. 

Centering Healthcare Institute offers a comprehensive benefits package which includes but is not limited to: health, dental and vision insurance, 14 paid holidays, 401(k) retirement plan with a 100% matched employee contribution of up to 6%, and flexible vacation time (unaccrued vacation time that full-time eligible staff can utilize after three months working with CHI), among many other health and wellness offerings.

Vaccination Requirements 

We are a healthcare consulting company committed to putting health and safety first for our staff, partners, constituents, and the larger communities in which we live and work. Staff who join Centering Healthcare Institute after December 6, 2021, will, as a condition of employment, be required to have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine prior to their start date with the Centering Healthcare Institute and be fully vaccinated (as that term may be defined by the CDC) within 30 days from that date, unless approved for an exemption.

Centering Healthcare Institute actively seeks to build a diverse staff that is reflective of the populations we aim to serve and the communities where we work. CHI encourages multiple perspectives and experiences and strives to hire and retain a diverse workforce. Our employees are passionate, curious, and eager for the challenge of changing healthcare.