Annemarie Heath

Dr. Annemarie Heath is a High Reliability Expert with Safe and Reliable Healthcare. She began her nursing career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador and the Dominican Republic where she noticed that significant improvement in a community’s health depends on engaging community women in the health care system. She subsequently earned her Masters in Nursing and Certificate in Midwifery as well as her Doctorate in Nursing Practice at Yale University School of Nursing.

Annemarie has been dedicated to serving low resourced communities through quality clinical care and health care system change for most of her career. She was a professor of nurse midwifery at the University of Puerto Rico with the aim of improving maternal infant health through midwifery care. In this capacity she was also a consultant for the Universidad Autonoma in the Dominican Republic and later founded and directed the 501(c)3 Proyecto ADAMES to address maternal and infant mortality in the Dominican Republic for over ten years. She co-authored numerous articles that focused on the impact of capacity building, cultural change, and clinical outcomes using a community based participatory research model.

Most recently, Annemarie has been the Co-Medical Director of Women’s Health and Director of Clinical Team Advancement at a community hospital in Massachusetts. She was responsible for the creation of a robust quality improvement program for the maternity department, implementation of high reliability practices including safety huddles, debriefs with good judgement, multidisciplinary simulation programs and transformation of the department to one of learning and trust. Specific initiatives include the implementation of a postpartum hemorrhage toolkit that resulted in halving of the frequency of postpartum hemorrhage and implementation of best practices for diagnosis and management of hypertensive disorders in pregnancy.