Why We Serve: Amy Gleason
In this series you’ll hear stories from USDSers and learn why they decided to join, why they stay, and how their work is making an impact for all Americans.
Amy Gleason (she/her), Team Lead, USDS @ Center for Disease Control. From Wesley Chapel, Florida.
After starting out in nursing, I quickly learned that I loved the ability to drive change using technology, and I initially joined a start up electronic health record (HER) company in Nashville, TN where I got to learn many different skills and try on a lot of hats in both the clinical and practice management. Ready for the start up life again, I moved to Tampa, FL and started at a newly founded electronic medical record company that was building the first cloud-based EHR. I lead the product and services parts of the business and grew this company to have clinical, practice management, and supply chain products, and it was sold three times where I ended up right back to the company I had worked for previously in Raleigh. During this time, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening disease at the age of 11, and I realized that the experience was even more challenging from the patient and caregiver perspective than from the provider side, so in 2011, I cofounded a company to help patients and their families get copies of their medical records and that provided care coordination services for patients with chronic diseases. After that, I was trying to figure out how to continue to drive change in healthcare, and I learned about USDS, and I started in October 2018, ready to learn how the government works and to bring any skills, talent, and grit to challenging projects.
What inspired you to join USDS?
I had seen firsthand all of the challenges in healthcare both personally and professionally from the provider, health system, laboratory, pharmacy, billing, supply chain side, and the patient and caregiver viewpoints. I wanted to see how my skills could drive change at a large scale for the American people. I was inspired by the values of USDS and the amazing accomplishments people who joined the government for tours of duty had accomplished. I wanted to give my service as well, so I signed up for a year tour of duty — two and half years ago I have been thrilled to lead the CMS Data and the Point of Care project that helped Medicare patients and providers by using claims data to inform doctors and patients on the patient’s previous history, medications, providers, and procedures to reduce the burden on both the patient and the provider. I also got to work on interoperability standards, price transparency, provider directories, and learning the enrollment process from the Social Security Administration. This was all before COVID-19 hit, and my focus changed.
What are you working on right now and how does it help people? Or what has been the biggest challenge?
Starting March 12th, 2020, I was detailed to the Office of the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator to work on technology and data challenges. Throughout the year, I co-founded and was a co-lead on the interagency team called the Data Strategy and Execution Workgroup that created a single data source for the federal response to use for data and analysis. This team worked on getting the different types of data, such as case, lab, hospital, syndromic surveillance, vaccine, death, and nursing home data, into a common system and then worked to improve the quality, define parameters on how to use the data, and created analysis for the response. This project helps people by combining the subject matter expertise from multiple agencies to improve the data together which reduced the need for duplicate, and often slightly different, data sets and analytics among the agencies. We also created new data sets that didn’t exist at the federal level, such as hospital reporting, and went from 0 hospitals reporting capacity and hospitalization information in March to 98% of hospitals reporting dozens of fields every day of the week. This data was very reliable in the response to understand the trends and outbreaks happening in local areas across the country and drove the federal response effort for supplies, alternative sites, and staffing support.
I also have been the Lead for a collaborative project between USDS and the CDC called Pandemic Ready Interoperable Modernization Effort (PRIME) that is three project that aim to improve the completeness, accuracy, and timeliness of data that is sent to the local and state public health departments so that they can take action faster. These projects are important because COVID-19 caused a lot of manual, duplicative, incomplete, and slow data reporting due to systems that didn’t scale, the number of new entrants into the testing and vaccination processes, and the prevalence of fax and paper in healthcare. These projects reduce the burden on the healthcare providers and on the public health departments by automating and streamlining the processes. I am very proud of the work that we have done to use data and technology to understand the situation and to drive action and response in a data-driven way. It has been an exhausting year, but I feel like I was fortunate to be able to contribute to this important effort.
What will you miss most about USDS when you leave?
USDS is a very special place. First, the work is so impactful as it can literally be impacting every person in the U.S., and the services and products we touch are at the core of our society — healthcare, social security, small business, immigration, veterans. It will be hard to find a job that feels as impactful as this one. Secondly, the people who take a break from their normal career or job to loan their time and skills to the federal government bring a set of passion and talent that is pretty incredible. I love that the values are not just things that exist but that are lived and practiced on a daily basis. I have really enjoyed having my skills and experiences stretched and enhanced by so many people who bring different skills, personalities, and life experiences to the table. I will truly miss the people.
The best of technology.
The best of government.
And we want you.
We’re looking for the most tenacious designers, software engineers, product managers, and more, who are committed to untangling, rewiring and redesigning critical government services. You’ll join a team of the most talented technologists from across the private sector and government.
If you have questions regarding employment with the U.S. Digital Service, please contact us at usds@omb.eop.gov or visit our Hiring FAQ.
