Karen C. Matthews, PhD, CEO
Dr. Karen C. Matthews serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Delta Health Alliance, a non-profit organization that initiates, manages and supports a wide variety of health care initiatives across the 18 county region of the Mississippi Delta. Dr. Matthews supervises a staff of over a 100 and an annual budget in excess of $45 million.
Dr. Matthews has worked with Delta Health Alliance since 2006. Prior to her current position, she served as Vice Chancellor of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, and before that, as Assistant Dean for the College of Medicine. As Vice Chancellor, she developed interdisciplinary collaborations in the areas of research, education, and patient care. Dr. Fox, a native of Fulton, Mississippi, earned a Ph.D. in Health Science Administration from the University of Tennessee. Her MBA came from the University of Memphis and her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of Mississippi.
During her twenty-five years in health care administration, Dr. Matthews has focused on employing information technologies to improve the delivery of health care, nurturing collaborations among professional disciplines and community organizations, and using quantitative assessment and evaluation to guide public policy making. She has served as principal investigator on numerous grants and contracts, authored more than fifty articles for academic journals, and written successful grant applications for more than $130 million in research support from U.S. Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Commerce, and Agriculture as well as numerous state and local funding agencies.
Education Strengthens the Southgate Community by Karen Matthews
Academic research has demonstrated over and over again that one of the barriers to economic and education progress in low income neighborhoods in lack of information about opportunities within the larger community. Traditional media just doesn’t work in these neighborhoods. To respond to this challenge one project of the Indianola Promise Community is to take [...]
Fit Day in Indianola by Karen Matthews
Last Saturday, the Indianola Promise Community and the Mayor’s Health Council sponsored “Fit Day” in the Southgate neighborhood. Encouraging children and parents to become more physically active and increase their intake of nutritious foods was the goal of the day long series of events. Mayor Steve Rosenthal and his wife, IPC staff, and other community [...]
Indianola Youth Council by Karen Matthews
Indianola’s middle and high school students are making a buzz in the community thanks to the newly formed Indianola Youth Council. What started as a couple of concerned high school students wanting to bring positive changes to the community has now grown into a formal organization made up of students from grades eight through twelve. [...]
Mississippi on the Cutting Edge
Mississippi has one of only 12 promise neighborhood grants the federal government has funded throughout the country. Here in the Mississippi Delta, it’s called the Indianola Promise Community, is a major project of Delta Health Alliance, and is designed to focus a number of different programs and interventions in a coordinated way to improve the education opportunities for [...]
Books for Sunflower County Children by Karen Matthews
A free book for any Sunflower County child between the ages of 0-5. That’s how the Imagination Library program hopes to encourage parents reading to their children and then children reading on their own. Imagination Library is a joint initiative between the Dolly Parton Foundation and Delta Health Alliance. Once a child’s family signs up for the program, he [...]
Indianola Parents & Schools by Karen Matthews
Two years ago, the Indianola Promise Community (IPC) formed a partnership with the Jackson chapter of Parents for Public Schools to create a network of parents with children at Lockard and Carver Elementary Schools. The goal was to equip these parents with the knowledge, skills and motivation to work with teachers and administrators to improve [...]
Indianola Youth Council by Karen Matthews
Early last Saturday morning, some of Indianola’s brightest students participated in the first meeting of the newly formed Indianola Youth Council. Ten junior and senior high students from local public and private schools make up the council, which will advise the mayor and other public officials on matters ranging from community service opportunities, ways to improve education, recreational needs,and similar [...]
IPC Summer Camp Update by Karen Matthews
For the last three years, the Indianola Promise Community (IPC), a Delta Health Alliance initiative, has partnered with and provided funding to 26 organizations to host summer camps for over 1,300 children. The summer of 2013 will be no different. Requests for Proposals have gone out, soliciting ideas from area organizations. This year, the focus is on improving [...]
From the Classroom to the Market by Karen Matthews
There’s a New Garden in the Delta! It’s called the Wiley Community Garden and its located at Delta State University, thanks to the property donated by the Wiley family in memory of Roy Wiley, a DSU professor emeritus. At the Wiley Community Garden, DSU Education majors are gaining valuable teaching experience in integrating classroom curricula [...]
Using Technology to Treat Asthma by Karen Matthews
While asthma is a common chronic condition, the problem for individuals who live in rural areas is the lack of physicians who specialize in treating the disease. Delta Health Alliance sought to overcome this challenge by linking our local clinics with asthma specialists via secure internet connections. The system is called telemedicine and involves having [...]
More Nurses in the Delta by Karen Matthews
Targeted grant funding, effective collaborations, and clear missions. Those are the ingredients for effective programs. And that’s the way I would describe our partnership with the Delta State University School of Nursing. When they approached Delta Health Alliance several years ago, they wanted to increase both the quality and quantity of nursing applications, increase the quality and quantity [...]
Reducing Hospital Readmissions, cont. by Karen Matthews
As a follow up to an earlier post about reducing hospital readmissions, I wanted to talk more about how our program translates into both better health and better business. Health care is improved by helping patients understand their discharge instructions, obtain medicine, and follow up with their providers. Patients with pneumonia, heart attacks, and lung diseases are often the [...]
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