Nursing alumna appointed Interim Chief Quality Officer at UCLA Dept. of Medicine

Dr. Anna Dermenchyan, PhD, RN, CCRN-K, CPHQ, an alumna of the UCLA School of Nursing, is the first-ever nurse to be appointed as interim Chief Quality Officer in the UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM). In this role, Dermenchyan will oversee quality activities that improve the quality of care provided by the DoM and design and implement interventions that improve population health.

Dr. Dermenchyan has 20 years of service at UCLA Health with 15 years in DoM. She is a strong leader with extensive clinical and healthcare management background. In all her roles, she has worked with interdisciplinary team members to improve the health of patients. As a certified professional in critical care nursing and healthcare quality, her expertise includes quality and patient safety, organizational leadership, performance and process improvement, and health data analytics. Since 2013, Dr. Dermenchyan has been part of the core team that has contributed to the strategic growth and success of the DoM Quality Program.

As the current director of quality, Dr. Dermenchyan has led, facilitated, and implemented improvement initiatives across the health system. She has performed strategic planning, program development and execution, oversight of organizational priorities, and policy improvements, and mentored numerous students, staff, and faculty. She has worked with data analytic teams to create and build data sets for chronic disease management initiatives, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, heart failure, and hypertension. This process has helped identify care gaps within the system and build evidence-based pathways to improve and optimize primary and specialty care performance. Her team has used dashboards to track, monitor, identify, design, communicate, and implement data-driven quality improvement initiatives for diverse patient populations.

Dr. Dermenchyan has served nationally as a Jonas Policy Scholar with the American Academy of Nursing and a Health Policy and Media Fellow with the George Washington University Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement. From 2018-2021, she served on the board of directors for the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, the largest specialty nursing organization representing the interests of more than half a million acute and critical care nurses in the United States. She has published manuscripts and book chapters and presented at multiple local, national, and international conferences.

Dr. Dermenchyan has earned a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from UCLA, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Mount Saint Mary’s University, and a Master of Science in Nursing and a PhD from UCLA School of Nursing.

This article was originally published by UCLA Health.