Catherine Hess, Senior Program Director

Catherine Hess is a Senior Program Director based in the National Academy for State Health Policy’s Washington, DC office, where she develops and directs programs focused on child health coverage, community health centers, and other health policy topics important to states. She serves as the Program Director for Maximizing Enrollment for Kids, a $15 million national initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Project Director for a David and Lucile Packard Foundation program funded for over a decade to provide technical assistance to and report on state CHIP programs; and Project Director for NASHP’s National Cooperative Agreement with HRSA’s Bureau of Primary Health Care to better inform state policy making as it affects federally qualified health centers. Catherine has nearly thirty years of senior and executive level state and national health policy experience. She was the first Executive Director of the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP), a position she held for fourteen years. AMCHP's and Ms. Hess' work were recognized by numerous awards, including the first HHS Dr. Vince L. Hutchins Partnership Award to Ms. Hess in 2001. From 2002 to 2005 Ms. Hess worked as an independent health policy consultant to clients that included the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, national organizations and state health agencies. She holds adjunct faculty appointments at both Johns Hopkins and George Washington Universities' schools of public health. In the 1980's, Ms. Hess served as Director of the Policy Office for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's Division of Family Health, where she played an instrumental role in the development of the nation’s first state maternity care insurance program, Healthy Start.. Ms. Hess graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Rochester and has a Master of Social Work from the Boston University School of Social Work.