Katherine Haynes is a senior program officer in CHCF’s Improving Access team, which works to ensure that Californians — particularly those enrolled in Medi-Cal — receive responsive, comprehensive, and coordinated care that supports their health and well-being. She uses research, strategy and organizational design, futurism, and design thinking to create scalable, sustainable programs.
Before joining CHCF, Katherine worked as program director at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, where she led systematic thinking about health and health care futures among executives of public and private organizations. Previously, Katherine built Kaiser Permanente Northern California’s diversity department — with the mission to advance language access and health equity — and served as its executive director. In this role, she directed a program that deployed design research and systems thinking to improve member experience to build accountability in the language program, and funded disparities-reduction projects in the health care delivery system.
She also served as the founding director of the technology and information exchange core at the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, where she fostered collaboration among epidemiologists, psychologists, substance use researchers, population specialists, and community-based AIDS service organizations to pioneer a community collaborative research program that was replicated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state of California.
Katherine received a bachelor’s degree in humanities from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in business administration from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently serves as the chair of the board of the American Jewish World Service and is an instructor for Institute for the Future.