About me
With experience from bedside to board room, Ms. Smith leads Target: BP, an initiative of the American Heart Association and the American Medical Association, designed to help health care organizations to improve blood pressure control by providing education, resources, and annual awards for improvement. Since taking this role, the initiative has grown from 330 to nearly 1900 participating health care organization serving 9.02 million patients with hypertension. More than 1000 organization have achieved BP control rates of 70% or higher and nearly 1700 have adopted evidence-based BP measurement practices.
Ms. Smith led the development of the clinical core curriculum as part of the National Hypertension Control Initiative (NHCI), a HRSA/OMH-funded demonstration project supporting 350 federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) to improve blood pressure control and implement self-measured blood pressure programs. From their 2020 pandemic baseline of 51.1%, the NHCI FQHCs improved their BP control to 60.9% in 2023.
Previously, Ms. Smith served as VP of Strategic Initiatives for C-Change, a national cancer not-for-profit and worked for fifteen years as a nurse, administrator, and consultant in hospitals across the country. In her professional volunteer roles, she served for the last decade on the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing National Advisory Board. She also served as a public member for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Family Medicine Residency Review Committee.
Ms. Smith earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Human Biology at Stanford University, Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing at Hopkins, and Master of Public Health degree at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
