Chris Barber

Director of Community Integration, Curandi

Chris Barber brings more than 40 years of experience in the healthcare field to her position as Curandi’s director of community integration. Her work focuses on the unique and important role of collaboration between social service organizations, community partners, state and county services and health care systems. She works closely with teams to address whole person/family care planning, connecting services in a common format, enhancing the use of collective impact and encouraging shared governance and data collection to foster innovation for improved community health outcomes with an emphasis on under-served communities. Prior to joining Curandi,

Ms. Barber gained extensive clinical, management and academic experience in the emergency response, long term care, hospital and clinic settings in her roles as an emergency medical technician, registered nurse and nurse practitioner. Her broad areas of expertise include hospital/health system strategic planning and implementation; organizational process and change management facilitation; and clinical product-line planning and implementation. She has led projects for new hospital-based cardiac surgical and interventional programs and helped lead a hospital to a Level 2 trauma designation. She also draws on prior experience as a director of clinical services at a large independent physicians’ association and 11 years working with the State of Oregon in various positions including Medicaid delivery systems manager and director of quality and clinical services for the Oregon Medicaid programs, where she was part of the management team that developed and implemented Oregon’s successful health system transformation and coverage expansion.

Layering mission, quality improvement and improved client outcomes into strategic and operational planning is an area of particular interest and strength for Ms. Barber. Throughout her career, she has focused on improving whole person care and she is excited to see the large body of work currently being done to address the social determinants of health.