Lelis B. Vernon

My path to healthcare consulting was completely unexpected. I originally studied English and languages, working as a writer, interpreter, and translator. Everything changed when my husband and I decided to give our first son a sibling and we got pregnant with twins. The twins were born extremely premature, and we spent four months in the neonatal intensive care unit. Throughout that experience, I saw many gaps in care, engagement, and opportunities to improve communication, information sharing, and participation in care delivery by the family. Once the twins graduated the NICU, I went back to the hospital and started a support group and a parent advisory council. I thought I was just doing support, but then I realized I was doing quality improvement in healthcare. I decided to study quality improvement and learn more about the mechanics of those approaches, and later got certified in research so I could better serve my teams, patients, and the different projects I was collaborating in. Finally, in 2021, I decided to formally get a degree in patient safety and quality improvement from Harvard Medical School. I was the only non-clinical person in the program, admitted only because I had 15 years of experience in the field and a body of publications and projects I had been part of. I think it speaks to the fact that the work people like me are doing in healthcare consultancy is valuable and relevant. That's where I've spent the last 18 years of my life, working at the intersection of patient and family engagement and science, specifically in maternal and infant care, authoring and co-designing projects that aim at improving care delivery for mothers and babies and answering hypotheses through research where there are needs for new discovery to tackle healthcare challenges for moms and babies.