Jennifer Carpenter, MSN, RN

Bio

Jennifer Carpenter, MSN, RN is currently Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer for University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children’s (RBC) and MacDonald Women’s Hospitals while also serving as Interim Chief Nurse Executive (CNE) for the health system. Prior to this, Ms. Carpenter was the VP for IT Clinical Systems at UH from 2015-2020, with oversight for the system wide electronic medical record (EMR) an all ancillary clinical technology. She earned a BSN from the University of Toledo/Medical College of Ohio (1992) and her MSN in Nursing Informatics from Walden University (2012). She is currently a Samuel H. and Maria Miller Scholar in the DNP Nurse Executive Track, Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Case Western Reserve University.

Ms. Carpenter has been a registered nurse for over 25 years. Her clinical career began in pediatric acute medical, surgical and oncology care and progressed to the role of Clinical Educator in pediatric nursing. She leveraged her clinical experience to lead the pediatric design and implementation of a major electronic medical record at UH from 2006-2010, before taking on further IT leadership positions. Among Ms. Carpenter’s formative experiences was the coordination of all IT projects for the hospital system’s Meaningful Use program from 2012 to 2014, which laid a foundation for improvements in care processes across the health system. She has a special interest in the optimization of electronic health records and other clinical systems to enable high reliability medicine and clinical decision support for better, cost effective patient care. In addition, Ms. Carpenter served as the IT executive lead for the integration of five acquired hospitals systems into the core financial and clinical system portfolio for the health system, overseeing the three-year effort between 2016 and 2019. A refocus on clinical nursing leadership in 2019 began with her appointment to the UH Nurse Executive Council, The council is credited with a transformative nursing strategic plan, which charters aggressive developments in nursing research, innovation, leadership and workforce improvements.

Ms. Carpenter was appointed a Healthcare IT Fellow with the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare IT for 2016-17, and honored as a 2019 Woman of Professional Excellence by the YWCA of Greater Cleveland. Her active professional organizations include American Organization of Nurse Leaders (AONL), Greater Cleveland Organization of Nurse Leaders (GCONL), and the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

Ms. Carpenter has extensive health system leadership experience, in both clinical operations and information technology. She excels in leading teams through periods of transition, including service in interim leadership positions as diverse and critical as Chief Information Officer, and the current interim CNE role. Ms. Carpenter is eager to embrace the challenges facing the health of women and children in Northeast Ohio with her diverse talents.