ABOUT ME

Cathy Kaufmann, MSW | Principal, Kaufmann Strategies 

Cathy has been a leader in transforming the delivery of health care. As a consultant, Cathy provides guidance and strategic planning, technical assistance, policy analysis, organizational assessment and improvement planning and meeting facilitation in the fields of health care and social services. She is skilled at supporting cross-sector coalitions to identify shared goals and work collectively.  

 

Prior to forming Kaufmann Strategies, Cathy was a Principal in a national consulting firm, where she worked with state Medicaid agencies, county governments, Medicaid managed care plans and health systems across the country. She is deeply knowledgeable about designing and implementing transformation projects that can drive change in the health care delivery system and across the community.

 

Her current clients include the Coalition of Accountable Communities of Health in the state of Washington, multiple Coordinated Care Organizations (CCOs) in Oregon, NARA Northwest, the Clatsop Rural Health Coalition and a cross-sector workgroup developing recommendations to reduce administrative burden for behavioral health providers.  

 

Cathy’s previous work includes federal and state policy advocacy and coalition leadership. During her time at the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), Cathy served as founding director of the Transformation Center, an office created to support Governor Kitzhaber’s Health Systems Transformation initiative to spread innovation across the CCOs. She was part of the executive team to establish Oregon's CCOs in 2012. She also led efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act and was responsible for helping streamline and improve Medicaid enrollment.

 

Cathy previously served as the administrator of the Office of Healthy Kids and the Office of Client and Community Services, OHA's medical eligibility and enrollment office. Healthy Kids was the largest expansion of health coverage in Oregon since the inception of the Oregon Health Plan in 1994 and successfully enrolled over 100,000 children into health coverage in a little more than a year. In recognition of her success at reducing the number of uninsured children, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) named Cathy a recipient of the Excellence in Children’s Health Outreach and Enrollment honor in 2011. 
 

Cathy’s policy experience includes serving as the enrollment program director at Families USA. In that role she set the organization’s enrollment policy and worked with consumer groups across the country on outreach and enrollment for Medicaid, CHIP and the marketplaces. Cathy also was the policy and communications director for Children First for Oregon, a statewide child advocacy organization focused on health care access and affordability, family financial stability and child welfare. She co-chaired the Human Services Coalition of Oregon, a public policy coalition made up of over 100 health, housing and human services organizations, leading the coalition to consensus on a shared agenda at a time when each sector faced significant budget cuts.