Kathleen Merkley

Kathleen Merkley worked as a nurse/clinical nurse specialist/nurse practitioner with Intermountain Healthcare for over 30 years.  As she grew as a clinician, working in Intermountain EDs, she saw firsthand the importance of trends and insights which could drive outcomes improvements leading to better patient care.  She was offered and welcomed the opportunity to direct work in medical informatics, specifically a system effort to develop an ED electronic health record.

Since joining Health Catalyst in 2013, Kathleen is the senior vice president for clinical improvement and leads a team of nurses who work with healthcare systems throughout the US and UK.  Her work has led to a decrease in US sepsis deaths, reductions in 30-day heart failure readmissions, improved pneumonia care, lowered C-section rates, and increased newborn breast-feeding.  She is especially proud of two efforts: most recently helping with an urgent effort in the UK to analyze airway care to understand survivability for COVID-19 patients and developing a tool with a large academic medical center that identifies sepsis patients using physiological data.  As a clinician dedicated to patient-centered care, she tries to never lose sight of the fact that technology is a means, not an end.  She believes a focus on data and technology guides the “real world” of patients and caregivers.

Kathleen holds a BS in nursing from South Dakota State University, a masters in physiology, a masters as an adult/family nurse practitioner, and a doctorate in nursing practice from the University of Utah.  She was on faculty at Westminster College and is currently adjunct nursing faculty at the University of Utah.  She serves on the board of directors for the Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance.