Barbara Abeling, PhD, RN
Vice President, Operations
Barbara has over 25 years of experience in health care. She spent many years providing direct patient care, primarily in obstetrics, before transitioning to clinical informatics. Barbara brings a wealth of knowledge regarding the electronic health record on topics ranging from the end-user workflow perspective to data extraction. Barbara has experience with both qualitative and quantitative research methods. She obtained her Masters and her PhD in Nursing Science Healthcare Leadership from the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis.
Asma Ahmad
CHPSO Coordinator
Asma has over 15 years of administrative coordinator experience, including ten years supporting executives. Her experience includes project coordination, documentation control, and database management. She has a strong background in customer service. Asma supports HQI and CHPSO with member contract and database management, and team calendar coordination, presentation development and travel arrangements.
Robert Imhoff
President
Imhoff joins HQI after heading the Maryland Patient Safety Center for seven years. As President and CEO there, he successfully partnered with hospitals to lead multiple improvement efforts, including their perinatal/neonatal quality collaborative, sepsis mortality reduction, falls reduction, and one of the most rigorous hand hygiene compliance programs in the nation. He also led efforts to pilot both an emotional support program for health care providers called “Caring for the Caregiver” and a patient safety certification program for hospitals.
Boris Kalanj, MSW
Director of Programs
Boris Kalanj joined HQI in March 2014 as Director of Cultural Care and Experience. His background includes leadership in the design and direction of patient experience programs in public and private hospital systems, and leading organizational strategies in diversity, language access, cultural competence, and care equity. Mr. Kalanj’s Master’s of Social Work from the University of Minnesota and his deep frontline experience provides expertise to connect patient, family and community needs and preferences to hospital care and services.
Scott Masten, PhD
Vice President, Measurement Science and Data Analytics
Scott Masten joined HQI in 2016 to help develop the Hospital Quality Intelligence Initiative (HQI2) data warehouse and advance our data processing, analysis, and reporting capabilities, as well as provide statistical consulting, program evaluation, and education for member hospitals.
Steve Pon, MBA
Project Manager
Steve Pon is a project manager with HQI, heading up Hospital Quality Improvement Platform. He has over 25 years of experience in the areas of business, education, and military. He came to HQI in 2017 from California Department of Public Health (CDPH) Communicable Disease Branch, where he headed the statewide ELR project to convert laboratory reporting to public health agencies from paper to real-time electronic laboratory reporting (ELR). Steve earned a BS from the United States Naval Academy and MBA from Drexel University.
Tim Rehwald
SQL Server & DBA Programmer
Tim has 34 years of in-depth experience in information technology across many knowledge domains. That expertise includes a focus on databases, system performance, virtualization, security, and programming. He has written dozens of management and monitoring tools and maintains 11 professional and technical certifications. Tim supports the CHPSO application/database pipeline and helps keep the larger Hospital Quality Institute (HQI) back-end infrastructure running properly.
Julia Slininger, RN, BS, CPHQ
Program Manager, Perinatal Mental Health Initiative
Ms. Slininger has more than 35 years of experience in healthcare Performance Improvement, Patient Safety, Risk Management, Infection Control, and Team Building- helping providers improve processes and outcomes. Facilitating peer-to-peer learning between healthcare teams, she has led several Collaboratives in the state of California, focused on a variety of goals including Patient Safety, Infection Prevention, Surgical Care Improvement, Readmissions Reduction and Team Communications.