Office of Healthcare Experience & Interoperability

Stella “Stace” Mandl is a certified public health nurse with 38 years of combined social work, nursing, policy development, and leadership experience and has dedicated her professional career to improving of patient care quality, safety, and patient outcomes. Stace serves as the Director for the Office of Healthcare Experience & Interoperability (OHEI). OHEI provides national leadership in realizing an integrated healthcare delivery system informed by and responsive to patients, the healthcare workforce, and customers of CMS programs by improving patient care, population health and the well-being of our healthcare workforce through policy, technology, and public input by driving collaboration to create an effective healthcare system centered on the experience of our customers. Stace previously served as the Deputy Director of the Office of Burden Reduction & Health Informatics (OBRHI), where she was responsible for its five Groups and its Mission to identify and create efficiencies across the healthcare enterprise by integrating technology, policy, regulation, and stakeholder engagement to improve healthcare quality and population health. 

Prior to joining OBRHI, Stace served in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation as the Staff Director for Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee and Designated Federal Officer. Stace served for over 10 years as a technical lead and then Director for the Division of Chronic and Post-Acute Care, located within the Quality Measurement & Value-Based Incentives Group of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality where she provided leadership, strategic oversight and advisory support for the post-acute quality reporting programs; as well as technical guidance and oversight for the implementation of the statutory requirements related to patient/resident assessment data standardization and quality measures in satisfaction of the Improving Post-Acute Care Medicare Transformation Act of 2014. 

Stace has a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from San Francisco State University and a Bachelor of Science in Social Work from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and served in the US Army Nurse Corps. Her clinical background includes emergency, peri-operative, psychiatric and medical-surgical services, research, and nursing leadership.

Suzanne Martin-Devroye serves as the Deputy Director for the Office of Healthcare Experience & Interoperability (OHEI) within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) with executive responsibility for operational leadership and execution of the Office’s annual budget and resource management. OHEI provides national leadership in realizing an integrated healthcare delivery system informed by and responsive to patients, the healthcare workforce, and customers of CMS programs by improving patient care, population health and the well-being of our healthcare workforce through policy, technology, and public input by driving collaboration to create an effective healthcare system centered on the experience of our customers.

Since joining CMS in 2010, Suzanne previously served as the Director of the Customer Focused Research Group within the Office of Burden Reduction & Health Informatics where her team cultivated relationships within the community of federal partners and external customers to make a meaningful difference in the daily lives of those we serve through improved interactions with government, prioritizing equitable delivery to those who have traditionally been underserved by gathering and synthesizing customer input to identify issues and root causes that impact health equity, healthcare delivery, access to services, inefficiencies, and burden experienced by providers and beneficiaries to ensure the customer perspective is in CMS’ policy writing and operational activities. She served as a technical advisor and human-centered design lead to the Office of the Administrator leading and supporting CMS's Patients over Paperwork Initiative. She also served as a Certified Enterprise Architect for HITECH and several CMMI Models such as MIPS, Pioneer ACO, CPC, and Bundles within the Office of Information Technology.

Prior to her federal career, Suzanne spent 20 years in the healthcare compliance industry focusing on helping clinicians design tools to make documenting their services easier to meet federal and state guidelines. She worked at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as the Assistant Director of Compliance, at Duke University as a Senior Compliance Analyst, and Ernst & Young as a Senior Healthcare Consultant.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Business and Management from the Johns Hopkins University and obtained her Certified Enterprise Architect certification from Carnegie Mellon University.

• Serves as CMS’ focal point and champion for advancing interoperability, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Administrative Simplification national standards, and technology to reduce administrative burdens that accounts for the lived experiences of our customers to realize an integrated healthcare delivery system informed by and responsive to patients, the healthcare workforce, and customers of CMS programs
• Provides an accountable and sustainable network of resources and services to support efforts across the agency aimed at reducing administrative frictions and burdens for individuals enrolled in CMS’ programs, health care providers, clinicians, health plans and clearinghouses; advances interoperability across the health system, advances customer experience (CX) to inform policies and programs.
• Convenes and manages executive-level Healthcare Transformation Council and initiatives that foster collaboration and coordination across programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and Marketplace to inform policymakers on the healthcare experiences of CMS’ customers.
• Leads, coordinates, and supports cross-agency projects to achieve greater efficiencies and address avoidable burdens in CMS operations and those that affect the day-to-day activities of health care providers, clinicians, beneficiaries, health plans, and clearinghouses, through technology and innovation.
• Leads, coordinates, or supports cross-agency projects to advance the exchange of health information among health care providers, clinicians, beneficiaries, health plans, and clearing houses to achieve operational efficiencies and make data available to inform evidence-based decisions.
• Establishes recurrent and ongoing customer experience (CX) mechanisms to obtain customer insights and feedback, such as requests for information, listening sessions, onsite engagements, and social media analysis, etc., to inform CMS’ programs and programs.
• Establishes a Human-Centered Design Customer Experience (CX) strategy to inform policies and programs on the lived experiences of those who engage in healthcare and provides resources and services to support customer experience engagements.
• Provide national leadership in realizing an integrated healthcare delivery system informed by and responsive to patients, the healthcare workforce, and customers of CMS programs by working collaboratively across CMS to increase the visibility of and engage external stakeholders in CMS’ burden reduction efforts, adoption of national standards, and interoperability initiatives.
• Maintains a qualitative research repository, provides oversight and maintenance of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Administrative Simplification, national standards, and interoperability efforts.
• Uses qualitative and quantitative methods to assess impact on customer experience (CX).
• Improve patient care, population health and the wellbeing of our healthcare workforce through policy, technology and public input by driving collaboration to create an effective healthcare system centered on the experience of our customers by infusing a customer-focused mindset throughout CMS’ policies and programs.
• Implements and supports the technologies, informatics and reporting, and innovative data- exchange tools for the Open Payments program. Develops strategic and operational plans for the necessary technologies and supporting tools required by the programs.
• Oversees the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES). This includes release planning, requirements gathering, oversight of the appropriate helpdesks, and user acceptance testing of all enhancements to the system.
• Serves as the systems owner for National Plan & Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) and Open Payments Program.