Chelsea Kelly-Reif

All work

Engineering a CMS Medicaid data portfolio

Role: Senior Director of Engineering · 2022–present

engineers led
53
in federal contracts
$100M+
moved into senior and leadership roles
9
State system AState system BState system CFHIRstandard exchangeCMS Medicaidreporting
Health-data interoperability: state systems exchange data through FHIR, a shared standard, so it can flow to CMS Medicaid reporting.

At Coforma, Chelsea leads engineering across a healthcare portfolio for government. One piece of it is a CMS Medicaid data-collection suite that states use to report on their programs. Her teams own that suite end to end. The work runs from architecture and delivery to security and compliance, and down to the day-to-day health of the people on several teams.

Teams under Chelsea's leadership engineer the data-collection suite. Named feature leads took a new application from zero to production, and the portfolio shipped hundreds of pull requests in a single year. The federal Medicaid Drug Programs (MDP) system is a separate matter. She oversees its delivery rather than building it hands-on. MDP is the platform roughly 780 drug manufacturers use to report the pricing data CMS relies on to calculate state Medicaid rebates, and a specialist engineering partner leads it technically.

Interoperability, and people

Chelsea leads Coforma's specialization in FHIR and health-data interoperability. FHIR is the modern standard for how health systems describe and exchange clinical data. It gives them a shared, structured vocabulary, and she sets the technical direction so systems can speak it natively rather than translating at the edges. The people side runs alongside the technical one. She has promoted nine engineers into senior and leadership roles, and she runs teams in a way that is trust-based and trauma-informed.

One thesis, two domains

The interoperability work reaches past health. On the workforce side, Chelsea published New Jersey's credential data to the national CTDL standard. It is the same open, linked-data idea as FHIR, pointed at credentials instead of clinical records. Both portfolios come back to one belief: public data should be open, standardized, and portable, so the systems and agencies that hold it can actually hand it off on behalf of the people they serve.

How the work is run

  • Architecture and delivery for federal healthcare data systems
  • Security and compliance built for government health data
  • Growing engineers, with psychological safety as an operating principle rather than a slogan
  • Healthcare
  • Leadership
  • FHIR
  • Interoperability