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UNC Chapel Hill
Master of Healthcare Administration
As a leading thinker in transformational healthcare delivery, Dawn specializes in helping clients envision a future outside the traditional hospital “box,” including new delivery channels, organizational models, and opportunities for collaboration. In addition to the latest data and modeling tools, her forward-thinking practice is solidly rooted in 30 years of healthcare consulting, marketing, planning and market research.
Dawn has deep experience in strategic planning, mergers & acquisitions, business planning, and financial feasibility. She also assists healthcare organizations with strategizing and preparing Certificate of Need applications and serves as an expert witness in CON litigation. She has worked in both the hospital setting and as a consultant to a wide variety of healthcare clients, including academic medical centers and community hospitals, home health agencies, hospice agencies, provider associations and physician groups.
Day to day at Ascendient, Dawn's time is spent managing the firm, overseeing business development, and working directly on client engagements. After decades in the business, she is still driven to help health systems deliver more effective, efficient care.
Dawn constantly uses her voice and her platform to advocate for healthcare transformation, urging leaders to stop defaulting to "the way it's always been done" and instead work for a system that delivers the right care, by the right provider, at the right time, in the right setting.
As a long-time advocate for more sustainable healthcare beyond our cities and suburbs, in 2021 Dawn co-founded the Rural Healthcare Initiative, a social enterprise consulting collaborative with a nonprofit arm that offers free education, research, and tools to rural hospital leaders.
Dawn is the proud mother of a 10-year-old boy and 1-year-old Lagotto. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro for her 40th birthday – a kind of tribute to her grandparents, who spent 40 years in Africa. If the job allowed for telecommuting, she would live part of the year in Tanzania, but until that happens, she tries to spend as much free time as possible at the pool, on the beach, or on a sailboat.
Dawn is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Higher Thinking for Healthcare, since 1994
