Margaret VanAmringe

Margaret VanAmringe is the Executive Vice President for Public Policy and Government Relations at The Joint Commission, and heads The Joint Commission’s Washington, D.C. office. She is responsible for developing strategic opportunities for The Joint Commission involving the public and private sectors. To accomplish this, Ms. VanAmringe works with government agencies, the Congress, consumer organizations, national professional groups, and purchasers of health care. The Washington office is The Joint Commission’s interface with the federal government and with public policy issues. It is also the office concerned with Medicare and Medicaid oversight of quality and its relationship to private sector accreditation; relationships with the Department of Defense; the Veterans’ Administration; the Public Health Service agencies; and with policymaking institutions such as MedPAC, the Government Accountability Office, and the Institute of Medicine.

Prior to coming to The Joint Commission, Ms. VanAmringe was Director for Research and Dissemination and Liaison at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (now the Agency for Health Research and Quality) in the U.S. Public Health Service. There she established programs to communicate health services research findings to a wide array of professional and public audiences. She established the agency’s first health information dissemination program to bring practical information gleaned from health services research into the hands of consumers and their families, and worked to have more health services research information indexed into the National Library of Medicine. She also established an external grants program to explore effective methods for disseminating new medical information to clinicians, and for changing medical treatment behavior to reflect evidence-based medicine.

Between 1989 and 1990, Ms. VanAmringe was a legislative fellow in the office of the Majority Leader, Senator George Mitchell. From early 1987 through 1989, she held various positions in the Immediate Office of the Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services, including Senior Advisor, and Acting Deputy Chief of Staff. While there, she provided advice on the full range of social and health policy issues. Before joining the Secretary’s staff, she spent ten years working in the Health Care Financing Administration (now CMS), DHHS, where she was Director of the Office of Survey and Certification, the component which was then responsible for developing health and safety standards for health care organizations reimbursed by Medicare/Medicaid, and for assuring that such federally funded entities met the government’s expectations for delivering quality care. She also worked in the contractor oversight division that dealt with payment operations, and in the Office of Legislation and Policy.

Ms. VanAmringe holds a Master of Health Sciences degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.