Laura Grangaard Johnson, MPH

Laura is a Senior Research Analyst with more than 10 years of experience providing analytic and program support for a wide range of state, regional, and national scale projects that address quality of care in healthcare and community settings. Her project portfolio at Stratis Health has focused primarily on rural quality improvement, serious illness care and coordination of care. Laura currently provides analytic expertise (including analysis, GIS mapping, reporting, data quality and management, tool/resource creation, and evaluation) to care transitions tasks within the CMS-funded QIN-QIO program, multiple Project ECHO initiatives addressing opioid use disorder topics, and the Health Resources and Services Administration Federal Office of Rural Health Policy funded Rural Quality Improvement Technical Assistance (RQITA) work. Laura currently serves on the technical expert panel for the Reevaluation of Inpatient Claims-Based Outcome Measures, convened by Yale New Haven Health Services Corporation – Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, under contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Laura has a Master of Public Health degree in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota and undergraduate degrees in biology and religion from Luther College.

 Sarah Brinkman, MA, MBA, CPHQ

Sarah joined Stratis Health as a program manager in 2016. She has more than 15 years of experience working in healthcare quality, ranging from the community to the national level. As a certified professional in healthcare quality Sarah supports a variety of healthcare settings in understanding their respective quality reporting programs, making sense of their quality data, identifying opportunities for improvement and implementing improvement strategies. She serves as the program manager and quality improvement specialist for the Rural Quality Improvement Technical Assistance program and a Program Director for the Superior Health Quality Alliance Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO). Sarah also supports Stratis Health’s health equity focused work, including the Culture Care Connection website. She was a 2020 National Rural Health Association’s (NHRA) Rural Health Fellow, currently serves on the NRHA Health Equity Council, and recently served as a panelist at the Rural Healthcare Provider Transition Project Equity and Quality Summit. Ms. Brinkman earned a Master of Arts in both Management and Business Administration from the College of St. Scholastica, where her studies focused on healthcare and organization development.