Hilary Heishman joined The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2011 as a program associate. She employs her background in community health planning to help the RWJF Quality/Equality team improve health care in targeted regions.
Heishman describes her work as “supporting the hard work of developing and implementing innovative approaches to improving community systems of health.” In this role, she contributes to RWJF’s Aligning Forces for Quality initiative as well as to health care payment reform and state outreach activities. Additionally, she contributes to Foundation-wide programming for cost of care, prevention, and business outreach. She is especially interested in the areas of overlap and coordination between health care and public health systems.
Previously, Heishman was a prevention specialist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While on field assignment, she managed the development of a Community Health Improvement Plan in Manchester, N.H. At CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., she supported the Influenza Epidemiology and Prevention Branch during the spread of 2009 H1N1 Influenza. She also worked with CDC’s Healthy Community Design Program in the National Center for Environmental Health to promote and evaluate Health Impact Assessments (HIA) and with CDC’s WHO Collaborating Center for Reproductive Health on a project to improve birth outcomes in hospitals in Kabul, Afghanistan.
She has also been involved with public health work or research at the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice, the Washington State Department of Health’s Public Health Improvement Partnership, and the University of Washington Child Health Institute. Heishman served in Peace Corps in Ghana, where she taught biology and later coordinated HIV/AIDS prevention programs.
Heishman received a bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Virginia and a Master of Public Health in Community Oriented Public Health Practice from the University of Washington, Seattle.
Born in West Virginia, she now resides in Princeton. She enjoys good conversation, good writing, and good food, and is ever eager to share all three with friends and family, as well as strangers.
