Debbie I. Chang, M.P.H, is Senior Vice President of Policy and Prevention and a Corporate Officer for Nemours Children’s Health System. Ms. Chang works to leverage Nemours’ expertise and experience to spread and scale what works through national policy and practice changes to improve the health and well-being of children nationwide. In addition, Ms. Chang and her team work with internal leaders to build on and continue Nemours innovative transformation to a value-based health system.
Ms. Chang has more than 29 years of federal and state government and private sector experience in the health field. She has held key government positions including Deputy Secretary of Health Care Financing at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, with oversight for Maryland’s Medicaid program and National Director of State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) when it was first implemented in 1997 at the Federal Department of Health and Human Services. Ms. Chang’s work on population health, child health systems transformation, Medicaid, SCHIP and Nemours' prevention-oriented health system including its CDC Pioneering Innovation award-winning statewide childhood obesity program has been widely published.
Ms. Chang holds a master’s degree in Public Health Policy and Administration from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Authored by Debbie I. Chang, M.P.H.
Innovative Medicaid Payment Strategies for Upstream Prevention and Population Health: An Executive Summary
AcademyHealth collaborated with Nemours Children’s Health System to help state Medicaid programs test approaches to financing upstream prevention and addressing social determinants of health. This brief highlights lessons learned and synthesizes important takeaways from that work.
Medicaid and Head Start
Medicaid cannot address and invest in social determinants on its own. This brief highlights Head Start as a natural partner offering significant opportunity for alignment of care coordination and service delivery with Medicaid.
Community Care Coordination Systems
Comprehensive systems that connect patients with both the health and social service sectors are an essential element to to addressing the social determinants of health. Based on work in Oregon, AcademyHealth and Nemours developed a checklist of the functions and features of a successful comprehensive system.