Kamala Allen, MHS

Vice President, Program Operations and Director, Child Health Quality
kallen@chcs.org

Kamala Allen is the vice president for program operations and director for child health quality at the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS). In these roles, Ms. Allen is responsible for ensuring the quality and efficiency of overall organizational programming, and providing direct oversight of all CHCS’ child-focused initiatives. She has extensive experience in the application of quality improvement methodologies and the use of managed care in public child-serving systems, and is also responsible for the direction and financial management of the Children in Managed Care initiative, which has been funded since 1995 by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Prior to assuming her current responsibilities, Ms. Allen was associate director for special projects for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Medicaid Managed Care Program, where she oversaw the development and execution of state agency training programs in health care quality, and served as associate director for program analysis and communications. She also worked as a program analyst in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Maternal and Child Health Bureau’s Office of Program Development, where she was a contributing author to the 1994 Bureau White Paper; and as project coordinator for the states’ responses to the Title V Block Grant Guidance. Ms. Allen was the project coordinator at the Centers for Disease Control’s Maryland Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, where she co-developed and oversaw the implementation of a school-based health promotion curriculum in two Baltimore middle schools.

Ms. Allen holds a master of health science in maternal and child health from the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Hygiene and Public Health. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration in developmental disabilities from the University of California at Los Angeles.