Allison Gertel-Rosenberg is VP, Chief Policy and Prevention Officer at Nemours Children’s Health. She has spent her career addressing some of the most important and challenging issues in population health. In her role, she is responsible for leading Nemours Children’s National Office of Policy and Prevention leveraging federal policy and advocacy efforts and innovative prevention and population health strategies to improve health and well-being outcomes for children. These efforts have included the highly successful Moving Health Care Upstream, Let’s Move! Child Care, Healthy Kids, Healthy Future, and the National Early Care and Education Learning Collaborative initiative with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ms. Gertel-Rosenberg is widely recognized as an expert on public health and population health and has written articles and presented at national conferences on child health, social determinants of health, multi-sector partnerships, social return on investment, obesity, health care, substance abuse prevention and treatment, and evaluation. Ms. Gertel-Rosenberg received her B.S. in public health from Rutgers College and M.S. in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Personal Statement
I currently serve Nemours Children’s Health as Vice President and Chief Policy and Prevention Officer. I endeavor to serve as a leader, spokesperson, and strategic champion across our five-state geography and more than thirty state footprint of the National Office. In my role at Nemours, I promote health for all children, including some of the most vulnerable in our society by working across sectors and engaging executive leadership. My work in the National Office has focused on creating impact across our Enterprise to address social determinants of health for at-risk populations, promoting excellence in early care and education, and allowing all children to thrive.

I am a forward-thinking strategic, respected analyst and a high-impact management professional with over two decades of experience in addressing health’s most challenging issues. My responsibilities include developing, leading, and achieving Nemours’ national policy, practice, and prevention goals through partnerships and identifying, assessing, promoting, and growing novel initiatives to address population health and equity concerns. I have managed teams, large funding awards, stakeholder coalition building, and budget oversight.

I would like to highlight a few key accomplishments. I have led efforts to spread and scale Nemours prevention and practice work include overseeing the National Early Care and Education Learning Collaborative with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in twelve states reaching more than 200,000 children. With great success, I have developed and implemented an early care and education initiative to focus on areas of high poverty and reduce inequities starting in the early years, spreading and scaling an adolescent health literacy curriculum to 13 states in fewer than two years and working with the White House and federal agencies to design and implement a public-private partnership focused on healthy eating and physical activity in childcare, Let’s Move! Child Care.

My experience in planning and management, process improvement, research, and strategic program design and implementation have been valuable in addressing population health concerns. I created and implemented a model that tests, spreads, and accelerates population health strategies that move clinical systems upstream to address the social determinants of health in communities; helped to build the field in support of investment in prevention and social determinants of health by establishing the business case; created and tested a tool to simulate the financial costs and benefits of investing in obesity prevention through Medicaid and conceptualized and lead a Social Return on Investment Initiative that encouraged health systems to look beyond traditional metrics of economic return.

I have also led an initiative to improve and align state early childhood systems, including childcare and clinical systems to attain better health outcomes and greater health equity for young children in four states. I am working to support states and communities in creating financially sustainable and accessible systems that ensure young children, regardless of race/ethnicity or family income, achieve equitable health, well-being, and education outcomes, leveraging funding from the Nemours Foundation and other funders.

In addition to my dedication to equity in pediatric health, I am an accomplished grant proposal writer and wrote a $12 million-dollar grant application to expand treatment access and has secured more than $60 million toward the support of child health. I directed the federally funded Center for Substance Abuse Treatment State Data Infrastructure Project and Center for Substance Abuse Prevention State Epidemiological Workgroup in New Jersey, coordinating across state departments, community organizations and federal agencies. In this role, I set priorities, facilitated a shared vision, and communicated results at the state and national level. Additionally, I served as a state representative and spokesperson to National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) Community Epidemiology Workgroup, highlighting New Jersey’s priority substance abuse prevention and treatment needs through national presentations and publications. Also serving as faculty for the NJ Institute for Continuing Education in Tobacco on topics including creating a community evaluation, setting priorities, and communicating strategy.

With my experience, I have produced numerous articles and am regularly an invited speaker at national conferences on the topics of child health, social determinants of health, multi-sector partnerships, social return on investment, obesity, health care, substance abuse prevention and treatment, and evaluation. My experience in staff development, supervision, coaching, and mentoring have proven ability to build strong relationships with strategic partners and leverage multi-disciplinary teams to inspire creative and pragmatic solutions in service of ensuring all children have the opportunity to be well and thrive.