Marci Nielsen

Executive Director

Marci Nielsen, Ph.D., M.P.H., is the Executive Director of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, a large coalition of provider/clinicians, purchaser/payers, and consumer stakeholders who have joined together to advance an effective and efficient health system built on a strong foundation of primary care and the patient-centered medical home (PCMH). She previously served as Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs and Associate Professor within the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, where she was twice awarded Professor of the Year by her students. She served on the Board of Directors of the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City, TransforMED LLC(a wholly owned, non-profit subsidiary of the American Academy of Family Physicians), and the MidAmerica Coalition on Health Care. Her research and teaching is focused on health system reform at the federal and state level, the relationship between socioeconomic disparities and health, access to primary care and the patient-centered medical home, and public health.  She has been a committee member on the Institute of Medicine’s Leading Health Indicators for Healthy People 2020 and Living Well with Chronic Illness: A Call for Public Health Action.

Marci has both state and federal health policy experience. Prior to rejoining the KU faculty, she was the first Executive Director (2006-2009) and Board Chair (2005), appointed by then-Governor Kathleen Sebelius, to oversee Kansas’ health care agency, the Kansas Health Policy Authority (KHPA). While at KHPA, she directed Kansas Medicaid, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the State Employee Health Program, and developed a coordinated health policy agenda for the state. At the national level, she worked as a legislative assistant to U.S Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska) during the debate over comprehensive health care reform in the 1990s. She later served as the health lobbyist and assistant director of legislation for the American Federal of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). 

Dr. Nielsen has an undergraduate degree in biology and psychology from Briar Cliff College, a Masters of Public Health from the George Washington University, and a doctorate in Health Policy and Management from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Early in her career she served as a Peace Corps volunteer working for Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health, and also served for six years in the US Army Reserves.