Working Together to Improve Cardiovascular Population Health using the Million Hearts® Initiative

Kate Gawlik is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Health and Wellness Academic Programming and the Co-Director the Health and Wellness Innovation in Healthcare program at The Ohio State University. She is certified by the American Nurses Credentialing Center as a family nurse practitioner and has experience in family practice, urgent care, and reproductive care with clinical interests in population health, preventive medicine, wellness, health professionals’ education, and cardiovascular disease prevention. She has also served as the Project Manager for the Million Hearts® initiatives at The Ohio State’s College of Nursing since 2013. Kate was awarded the 2018 Nurse Practitioner State Award for Excellence and was inducted as a Fellow in the American Association of Nurse Practitioners’ the same year.

Bernadette Melnyk is Vice President for Health Promotion, University Chief Wellness Officer, Helene Fuld Health Trust Professor of Evidence-Based Practice and Dean of the College of Nursing at The Ohio State University (OSU), Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at OSU’s College of Medicine, and Executive Director of the Helene Fuld Health Trust National Institute for EBP. She is a pediatric and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, an entrepreneur, and is nationally/internationally recognized as a leader, innovator and expert in EBP, intervention research, child and adolescent mental health, and health and wellness. Her funding includes over 33 million from federal agencies and foundations as a PI. Dr. Melnyk has edited seven books and has over 430 publications. She is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Nursing, the National Academies of Practice, and the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Dr. Melnyk serves as editor of the journal Worldviews on Evidence-based Nursing. She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Promoting Emotional Well-Being and Resilience Expert Panel, is an invited member of the National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-being and Resilience and is a board member of the National Forum for Heart Disease & Stroke Prevention.

Dr. Melnyk founded the National Interprofessional Education and Practice Collaborative to advance DHHS’s Million Hearts® initiative, which has over 150 participating organizations and universities. She founded the National Consortium for Building Healthy Academic Communities, a collaborative organization to improve population health in the nation’s institutions of higher learning, and serves as its current president.