Geri Lynn Baumblatt, MA
Geri grew up working in her father’s primary care practice. While in graduate school, she was in a serious car accident and experienced the challenges of the U.S. health system. She decided to apply her writing and teaching experience to help patients and clinicians connect, communicate, and engage. After spending a couple years creating online education for nurses, in 2003, she joined the founders of Emmi Solutions to co-design the flagship EmmiPrep programs, which educate patients, set expectations, equip them to ask important questions, augment informed consent, improve outcomes, and create a new channel for patient-clinician communication. Over the next 15 years, Geri became the Editorial Director and designed hundreds of resources used at over 500 hospitals to help people participate in shared decision making, care transitions, live with chronic conditions, and care for loved ones. Her team worked with medical animators, decision scientists, behavior change experts, patients, family caregivers, and clinicians at create a large library of multimedia programs and interactive calls. In 2014, she became the Executive Director of Patient Engagement, a research, implementation, and speaking role. She partnered with physicians, neuroscientists, behavior and decision scientist at organizations like Dartmouth, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and Tufts to conduct and publish research on patient engagement, health literacy, patient safety, and outcomes.
Her experience as a family caregiver led her to co-found a nonprofit: the Difference Collaborative Alliance, which conducted and is publishing research on nurse family caregivers, and how this impacts both nurse and patient safety. She also cofounded the Difference Collaborative, LLC: to help employers ensure their employees can care, work and thrive.
Geri also consults on and designs patient engagement and communication, content design and strategy for organizations like AHRQ, CMS, the Digital Medicine Society, the American Telemedicine Association, Roobrik, and Conversa. She’s currently the Chief Engagement Officer for Docola, a social good organization that has created a free patient education platform.
Geri also served on the Board of the Society for Participatory Medicine and founded the Chicago chapter. She was the multimedia expert for AHRQ’s Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool. She currently serves on the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Patient Engagement Advisory Panel, the Patient Experience Policy Forum, the leadership editorial board for the Journal of Patient Experience, writes a column on patient engagement for Healthcare IT Today. On Twitter: @GeriLynn
