Originally from the Midwest, Debbie moved after college to the mountains of Colorado where she has lived full and part-time for the past forty years.  She now splits her time between Detroit Lakes, Minnesota (on the same lake where she grew up as a child) and Breckenridge, Colorado. She has been a dedicated partner for forty-five years to her husband Bob, a proud mom to grown daughters (Ashlee and Julia), and a doting grandmother to Avery, Ace, Crew, and Gunner.

About Essentia Health

Never forgetting her mid-western roots, Debbie returned to Minnesota for seven years to join forward-thinking, Essentia Health. Essentia Health is an integrated delivery system with 14 hospitals and a 1,500-provider health system, spanning the states of Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. As Chief Population Health Officer, Debbie’s team designed, built, and operationalized Essentia’s 2.5 billion dollar transition from volume-based to value-based care. The results led to forty-two percent of the system’s fee-for-service revenue flowing through its value-based agreements. This transformation produced record earnings on shared savings and allowed Essentia to reinvest new capital into enhanced chronic care programs, digital solutions to care delivery, screening programs for the social needs of patients, and building outreach programs to minimize health disparities and build health equity. I

Known for recruiting great talent and building high-performance teams, Debbie joined Essentia and its culture to lead over two hundred associates whose responsibilities included building a comprehensive telehealth infrastructure, expanding remote patient monitoring to rural areas, and implementing hospital-at-home programs and designing a new payer contracting strategy integrated with their care management and community health and wellness programs.

By developing integrated care management programs and clinically redesigning care delivery to ensure that high-value care is adopted and delivered across the System’s service area, her team transformed the clinical practice of care to become a regionally and nationally recognized leader by the National Committee on Quality Assurance as a top-tier Accountable Care Organization performer.

Before joining Essentia and for more than three decades, Debbie worked for large and small heath systems and physician organizations in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin helping them strategically position themselves for financial, clinical, and operational successes in capitation and value-based care.