Office of Burden Reduction & Health Informatics

Stella “Stace” Mandl is a certified public health nurse with 38 years of combined social work, nursing, policy development, and leadership experience and has dedicated her professional career to improving of patient care quality, safety, and patient outcomes. Stace serves as the Acting Director (and the Deputy Director) for the Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics (OBRHI) where she is responsible for supporting OBRHI, its five Groups and its Mission to identify and create efficiencies across the healthcare enterprise by integrating technology, policy, regulation, and stakeholder engagement to improve healthcare quality and population health. 

Prior to joining OBRHI, Stace served in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation as the Staff Director for Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee and Designated Federal Officer. Stace served for over 10 years as a technical lead and then Director for the Division of Chronic and Post-Acute Care, located within the Quality Measurement & Value-Based Incentives Group of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality where she provided leadership, strategic oversight and advisory support for the post-acute quality reporting programs; as well as technical guidance and oversight for the implementation of the statutory requirements related to patient/resident assessment data standardization and quality measures in satisfaction of the Improving Post-Acute Care Medicare Transformation Act of 2014. 

Stace has a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from San Francisco State University and a Bachelor of Science in Social Work from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and served in the US Army Nurse Corps. Her clinical background includes emergency, peri-operative, psychiatric and medical-surgical services, research, and nursing leadership.

Suzanne Martin-Devroye has been at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for 13 years and is currently serving as the Acting Deputy Director and the Director of the Customer Focused Research Group (CFRG) within the Office of Burden Reduction & Health Informatics (OBRHI). She and her team cultivate relationships within our community of federal partners and external stakeholders to make a meaningful difference in the daily lives of those we serve through improved interactions with government, prioritizing equitable delivery to those who have traditionally been underserved by gathering and synthesizing customer input to identify issues and root causes that impact health equity, healthcare delivery, access to services, inefficiencies and burden experienced by providers and beneficiaries to ensure the customer perspective is in CMS’ policy writing and operational activities. 

Previously, Suzanne served as a technical advisor and human-centered design lead to the Office of the Administrator leading and supporting CMS's Patients over Paperwork Initiative and as a Certified Enterprise Architect in the Office of Information Technology. Prior to her federal career, Suzanne worked at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as an Assistant Director of Compliance, at Duke University as a Senior Compliance Analyst, and Ernst & Young as a Senior Healthcare Consultant. Suzanne has 20 years of healthcare compliance experience focusing on helping clinicians design tools to make documenting their services easier to meet federal guidelines.

• Serves as CMS’ focal point and champion for burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability, and engages internal and external customers to inform solutions.
• Provides an accountable and sustainable network of resources and services to support efforts across the agency to reduce administrative burden for health care providers, clinicians, beneficiaries, health plans and clearing houses; advance interoperability across the health system; and improve customer experience.
• Convenes and manages executive-level Steering Committees to inform and prioritize burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability activities and initiatives and to foster collaboration and coordination across programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and Marketplace.
• Leads, coordinates, or supports cross-agency projects to eliminate overly burdensome and unnecessary regulations; simplify, clarify, or remove sub-regulatory guidance; and achieve greater efficiency in CMS operations that affect the day-to-day activities of health care providers, clinicians, beneficiaries, health plans, and clearing houses.
• Leads, coordinates, or supports cross-agency projects to advance the exchange of health information among health care providers, clinicians, beneficiaries, health plans, and clearing houses to achieve operational efficiencies and make data available to inform evidence-based decisions.
• Establishes recurrent and ongoing mechanisms to obtain customer insights and feedback, such as requests for information, listening sessions, onsite engagements, and social media analysis.
• Establishes a Human-Centered Design strategy for the agency’s burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability initiatives and provides resources and services to support implementation.
• Works collaboratively across CMS to increase the visibility of and engage external stakeholders in CMS’ burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability initiatives.
• Maintains a repository of burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability efforts and accomplishments across CMS.
• Uses qualitative and quantitative methods to assess impact on customer experience.
• Works to infuse a burden-reduction, interoperability, customer-focused mindset throughout CMS.