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HOME > ABOUT RCHC > PRESS > SEPTEMBER 4, 2006
Article published - September 4th, 2006
Credit: North Bay Business Journal
PROFILE: NANCY OSWALD
BY DORSEY KINDLER
STAFF REPORTER
SANTA ROSA – When Nancy Oswald took her post as executive director of Redwood Community Health Center this time last year, she was given a specific mandate: Take the organization from a loose association of community clinics in Marin, Napa, Sonoma and Yolo counties to a highly integrated network, incorporating economies of scale to increase cost efficiency and improve quality of care for under- and uninsured patients.
By that metric, Ms. Oswald and her staff have certainly met expectations. Redwood and its 14 community service providers are deep into the process of setting up a shared electronic records-keeping system on par with major healthcare systems. All service providers will be required to make a contribution to the project's estimated $5 million cost based on size, and Ms. Oswald has successfully lobbied both Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health to contribute funds.
"This is going to be the biggest investment any of these clinics has made in the last 10 years," she said.
Ms. Oswald contributes much of her ability to cut through red tape and get seemingly disparate organizations to work toward a common goal, which she's learned from childhood experiences. She was born at a Sutter hospital in Sacramento, the daughter of a professor of plant pathology at U.C. Berkeley. While her early years were spent in bucolic Davis, she split her time in high school between her father's home in Berkeley and summering with her mother's family in Alabama.
"Even though I grew up in Berkeley in the 1960s, a place that was at the forefront of many things, I was raised by a very traditional Southern mother," she said. "And that's one of the things that I've been told; that I'm good at bridging cultures and bringing very different people together."
After completing her undergraduate work at Stanford and getting her teaching degree in L.A., Ms. Oswald found herself in New York City in the early 1980s trying to qualify as a city school teacher. When she realized she was making more money working part time for a local interns and residents association, she left teaching behind for a career in health care.
"I got the sense that I could do things in health care which as a schoolteacher I wouldn't have the same opportunities," she said. "That said, I miss the immediate feedback I got from kids. It's very different than what you get from doctors."
Ms. Oswald moved back to Berkeley in 1994, where she has remained since, to work for as executive director of the National IPA. In 2000, she left to become an independent consultant for Pacific Business Group on Health before she took her current position at Redwood. She feels that all of her previous positions have left her with very specific skills, skills that she can bring together in concert at her post with Redwood Community Health Coalition.
"Once I got into health care, there was no chance of my career going in another direction," she said. "It is a very complex, non-system. But I enjoy bringing people to come to an understanding that is greater than any one entity can accomplish on its own."
Most appropriate business skill: I think I have an ability to understand complexity and be as clear as possible when things are ambiguous, because nothing is crystal clear in health care.
Most vivid work-related memory: I remember going to Bellevue Hospital in New York early in my career, visiting the emergency room and seeing just how incredibly packed it was. I saw first hand that using an emergency room as a doctor's office wasn't a good way to get care.
Recent read: "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell
Best business decision: I'm really a believer in that you make the best choice based on what you know at the time.
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