Company

Team Member Profile

Rachel I. Mandel, MD, MHA

Senior Process Improvement Specialist

Dr. Rachel I. Mandel is a physician executive with over 23 years of clinical practice experience with a focus on aligning the medical staff with healthcare strategies through major quality initiatives.At OPS, she works with process improvement teams to help clients achieve operational excellence, with a specific focus on interfacing with physicians and other healthcare professionals.

In her career, Dr. Mandel has concentrated on integrating administration and medical staff to adopt changes in healthcare, including population health and total cost of care models. She is experienced in evaluating key dynamics and issues on both a healthcare system and service line level. She focuses on clinician communication to positively impact patient experience and quality outcomes as well as provider satisfaction and resilience. She develops and coordinates effective teams that help drive high reliability, performance improvement and efficiency.

Board Certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dr. Mandel worked within the Frederick Memorial Healthcare System, Frederick MD from 1998 through 2018, beginning as a Private Practitioner, and serving in various management and physician leadership capacities, including Vice President of Medical Affairs in 2018. Her experience at Frederick Memorial included engagements in Population Health, Quality Improvement, Physician Quality and Alignment,Emergency Preparedness, Women's Health, Patient and Family Centered Care, and the Advanced Directive/Palliative Care Initiatives.Specific assignments have included:

Actively participating in the senior leader team that guided the consistent provision of value driven health care for the community. The success of these initiatives resulted in continuing improvement in readmissions, mortality, LOS and hospital acquired conditions.
Implementing the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 4M framework for the care of the complex and resource intensive geriatric population, sparking a move towards care redesign in all populations.
Creating and chairing the Procedure Review Oversight Committee (PROC), whose mission is to assess the hospital's surgical scope in relation to the Maryland's Global Budget Revenue reimbursement model. PROC recommendations have resulted in significant cost savings by identifying procedures best done in lower cost settings,while providing the same quality outcomes.
Engaging as a senior leader sponsor for the Advance Care Planning committee.The percentage of admitted patients with advance directives on file rose from single digits to over 25%, which improves the patient experience, decreases Length of Stay, increases hospice use and appropriately decreases the cost of care. LEAN methodology was employed to streamline the process used across the system to acquire the patient's advance directive for inclusion in the electronic health record for provider reference.
Oversight of the implementation of an evidence based algorithm for the diagnosis and management of sepsis, resulting in >80% adherence to the sepsis core measure which decreased mortality and morbidity

In addition to her work with Frederick Memorial Hospital, Dr. Mandel worked at Washington County Hospital in Hagerstown, Maryland from 1996-1998; and at the U.S. Army's Womack Community Hospital at Fort Bragg,North Carolina from 1991-1995 and Darnell Army Community Hospital at Fort Hood, Texas from 1990-1991.Dr. Mandel received her Doctor of Medicine from the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. She did her residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii. She also holds a Master's Degree in Health Administration from Mount St. Mary's University located in Emmitsburg, Maryland.