Innovation in Population Health Center


The IPH Center is dedicated to improving outcomes for children, youth, adults, and families, through research, education, implementation support, and the development of practical tools that help systems make better decisions. As the academic home of the Transformational Collaborative Outcomes Management (TCOM) framework, the Center partners with organizations around the world to promote person-centered care and meaningful outcomes.

John Lyons

IPH Center Director | Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience

Our Work

Teams

The Operations Team helps create the structure, clarity, and support that people and organizations need to do their work well. We build and maintain the processes, systems, pathways, and operational supports that help partners, providers, trainers, and internal teams navigate their work more easily. Our role is to reduce barriers, improve consistency, and ensure the right pieces are in place so that human-serving systems can stay focused on supporting children, adults, families, and communities.

Lauren Mergen

Lauren Mergen, EdD | Deputy Director of Operations

The Implementation/Strategy Team is a cross-functional leadership group responsible for guiding the strategic planning, implementation, and sustainability of the TCOM framework within organizations and service systems. They work collaboratively with system leaders, agency administrators, program managers, and system partners to establish implementation priorities, monitor progress toward defined goals, and address barriers. The team provides support for all implementation activities, ensuring that contracted project deliverable timelines are met.

Mark Lardner

Mark Lardner, MSW | Senior Strategy Lead

The Precision Analytics Team provides cutting-edge person-centered analytical support and translational science to state and local governments and other organizations invested in improving health outcomes for youth and families. Precision Analytics builds upon the idea of Precision Medicine, moving away from one-size-fits-all approaches to finding more precise solutions that consider a person’s specific needs and strengths as well as the context in which they are being helped. We believe that focusing on learning and adaptation naturally increases expertise within helping systems and places data squarely into practice management and policy development.

Olga Vsevolozhskaya

Olga Vsevolozhskaya, PhD | Team Lead

The IDEA Team designs high-quality learning materials, including courses, videos, and digital guides, that help professionals understand and apply the TCOM approach in practice. We have instructional designers, multimedia specialists, and content matter experts who help translate complex concepts into practical, engaging, learning resources that support better decision-making and improved outcomes for children, youth, adults, and families.

Ari Acosta

Ari Acosta, MS. MSW | Team Lead

The Teaching and Certification Team provides workplace training on the various TCOM tools to the staff, management, and executive levels. The team helps create a learning culture with productive attitudes to build a workforce’s tangible and intangible abilities to manage an effective system of care. The Teaching and Certification team also provides one-on-one TCOM coaching as well as team consultations to support the successful certification of all tool users.

Brandon Howlett

Brandon Howlett, M.Ed. | Team Lead

The Technology and User Support Team is the one in charge of supporting the worldwide users of our training platform TCOMTraining.com. We create the certification courses and are in charge of reporting on our Learning Management System, but we also manage the Support Desk, assisting users with concerns, navigation, and technical requirements to complete their certifications of the TCOM tools.

Stephanie Shanks

Stephanie Shanks, MSIDT | Team Lead

The Student, Community Engagement and Partnerships Team strengthens the TCOM Collaborative through two connected areas of work: communications and engagement. These inform one another through listening, feedback, innovation, iteration, and relationship-building. We ask a simple guiding question: What serves the greater good and helps us build meaningful, useful shared spaces? Our goal is to create environments where people recognize their strengths, learn from one another, and exchange knowledge, ideas, and resources.

Amy Fredericks

Amy Fredericks, MPS | Team Lead