The Collaboration Conference 2015

Amy Celep guides Community Wealth Partners' strategic direction and oversees the team’s efforts to support partners in solving problems at the magnitude they exist. Amy was named to this role in April 2010, and since then has led the organization in developing and implementing a new strategy for greater impact, while achieving significant revenue growth and securing a marquee list of partners.  Amy served in various consulting and management roles with Community Wealth Partners for eight years before moving into her current position. Prior to joining the organization, she worked in the nonprofit sector as a marketer and fundraiser and in the private sector where she served as a producer for a CBS affiliate’s award-winning evening news. In 2011, Amy was honored as one of The Washington Business Journal’s 40 Under 40. Amy received her MBA from Georgetown University and her BS from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Dr. Ortiz’s work revolves around building and strengthening early childhood systems to promote language acquisition and emergent literacy for children birth through age eight.  In this role, Dr. Ortiz works in conjunction with the Foundation's community investment team to identify partnership opportunities and implement the Foundation's strategic early childhood education investment goals in Arizona and Florida.

Dr. Ortiz brings more than 25 years of academic and professional experience in early childhood education.  In addition to practical experience within school districts and classroom settings, she served as an early childhood policy advisor to Arizona’s Governor Janet Napolitano and was Director of the State Board on School Readiness. Dr. Ortiz has helped lead statewide and national initiatives impacting children ages birth to eight and their families. Dr. Ortiz is a graduate of Arizona State University and holds Doctoral and Master degrees in Curriculum and Instruction, Early Childhood Education.  She holds undergraduate degrees in business and nursing. 

Uma Kotagal is senior vice president for quality, safety and transformation and executive director of the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. As director of the Anderson Center, Dr. Kotagal oversees the development of disease management teams and development and institution of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines.

The primary purpose of the Anderson Center is to foster health services research and system transformation with the goal of improving the quality of healthcare delivery, translating knowledge into practice, and building the next generation of improvement leaders.

Dr. Kotagal was director of the neonatal intensive care units at the University Hospital and at Cincinnati Children’s for several years. While practicing, Dr. Kotagal recognized that care and outcomes improvement were a system property. She completed additional training, receiving her master’s of science in clinical epidemiology and clinical effectiveness from the Harvard School of Public Health, and refocused her clinical efforts on quality transformation at a systems level. She was also a visiting scholar at the Center for Risk Analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health and a visiting professor at the Tufts New England Medical Center, in the Division of Clinical Decision Making, completing further training in the field of decision and cost effectiveness analyses.

Dr. Kotagal has published extensively in the field of neonatal outcomes research, including studies on neonatal cost models, and early discharge of newborns. She published the first landmark paper on early discharge programs in the NICU setting.

Dr. Kotagal was born in Bombay, India, where she received her undergraduate and her MBBS from the University of Bombay. She did a rotating internship at the University of Bombay from 1970-1971 and another rotating internship at Detroit General Hospital from 1971-1972.

At Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Dr. Kotagal completed her pediatric residency from 1972-1974 and went on to do a fellowship in neonatology from 1974-1975. She completed a fellowship in neonatal physiology at the University of Cincinnati from 1975-1977.

Dr. Kotagal is a senior faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare. She also serves as chair of the quality steering team of the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association, as a member of the advisory committee of the Toronto Patient Safety Center, as an associate editor of BMJ Quality and Safety and as a member of the Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Kotagal is also a member of various local, regional and national committees in the area of child health.