Dr. Deborah Mullen’s career has been defined by a passion for improving health care systems—from her early days in health care operations in Minnesota to her current role as the Greg A. Vital-Franklin Farrow Professor of Healthcare Management at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Her career path to UTC, she said, is one of curiosity, collaboration and a commitment to bettering outcomes for patients and providers.
“I started out doing medical records work and coding,” said Mullen, a member of the UTC faculty since 2018. “As I progressed through my career and went through different operational kinds of jobs, I really became interested in, ‘How do we make the business of health care work better for the patients and for the people who work in it?’”
Mullen, who received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Western Carolina University and both a master’s and Ph.D. in Health Services Research, Policy and Administration from the University of Minnesota, began her career in health care operations “tackling challenges” in quality and process improvement. At HealthPartners/Park Nicollet Health Services in Minneapolis, she served as a senior research scientist, splitting her time between conducting clinical research and working directly with clinics to optimize their workflows.
Her efforts, she said, often targeted reducing provider burnout, improving patient satisfaction and creating more efficient systems of care.
“Part of my time was available to the clinicians, the clinics and hospitals associated with that group,” she explained. “I learned to do research and to help them do what we would call rigorous quality improvement,” such as improving diabetes care or “trying something really radical or different.”
“About 25 to 30% of my time was spent helping a clinic figure out how to see more patients, make the appointments better for the patients, help families and the patients navigate, and help the nurses and doctors not have burnout,” she continued.
Mullen said her work aligned with the “quadruple aim” of health care: enhancing patient and family satisfaction, improving the work life of clinicians, achieving better outcomes and delivering value for the cost of care. While her role was nonclinical, she collaborated closely with doctors, nurses and behavioral health specialists.
Her foray into academia, she said, came almost by accident. While completing her graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, she began teaching as an adjunct instructor at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois—instructing students online but traveling to the Chicago-area institution for in-person faculty meetings.
What started as a part-time teaching role evolved into a passion for education.
“I was a researcher by day and taught classes at night and on weekends, so I got the mix of both,” she said of her eight years at St. Francis. “When this opportunity at UTC came up, I was excited because I could combine my love for research and teaching in one place.”
Since coming to Chattanooga, Mullen has bridged business and health care in her classroom and beyond through numerous interdisciplinary collaborations. She cited several partnerships, such as working to support Dr. Kristi Wick in the School of Nursing with ROAD MAP—a grant-funded mobile health vehicle that will soon serve older adults and caregivers in rural communities across the region—on the business side of sustaining that program; multiple grant projects with Guerry Professor Emeritus Gregory Heath in the Master of Public Health graduate program; and work she has been doing with CHI CommonSpirit and with Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis.
One recent example of this collaborative spirit is Mullen’s work on the Annals of Family Medicine paper, “Adult ADHD Diagnosis in a Family Medicine Clinic.” Published in the November/December 2024 issue, the “Innovations in Primary Care” paper details an innovative approach to reducing the time it takes to diagnose and treat ADHD in adults.
The project grew from the curiosity and initiative of residents affiliated with the University of Minnesota Methodist Family Medicine Residency in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Mullen explained that adult patients seeking diagnosis and treatment of previously undiagnosed ADHD can wait up to a year for formal diagnosis in behavioral health clinics locally. The residents were interested in learning whether they could diagnose mild ADHD cases in the clinic. “They asked, ‘Why not?’ and came up with a process that significantly reduced wait times for diagnosis and treatment.”
She said a quality improvement plan developed by the residents was put together in which a “green folder full of little surveys that were already printed out” was available for them to give to patients. The pilot program decreased wait times for diagnosis and treatment by 46-96% compared to behavioral health referrals, significantly improving care access and patient satisfaction and increasing the clinic’s ability to manage complex psychiatric conditions with a low-cost and adaptable solution.
Mullen’s role focused on operationalizing the program, creating quality improvement frameworks and ensuring the project’s success.
“Even the front desk staff could implement parts of the process and score the surveys,” she said. “It was an elegant—yet simple—solution that improved access to care and outcomes for patients.
“It just shortened the amount of time between when the patient said, ‘Hey, I think this might be a problem for me, Doc,’ and when they actually learned something.”
Other recent collaborations include projects addressing sleep apnea, food insecurity and the use of artificial intelligence in rural health care, Mullen said. Her research and expertise frequently take her to national and international events—including early 2025 trips to the International Stroke Conference in Los Angeles and the American College of Healthcare Executives Conference in Houston.
“Staying relevant in health care includes understanding what the day-to-day is like,” she said. “It helps me bring the latest developments into the classroom.
“I lived through Medicare Part D. I lived through the advent of electronic health records. The tie to clinical is so critically important … to be able to give students who are coming at it from a business background.”
Mullen said she creates an environment in her teaching where students from diverse backgrounds—clinicians seeking business expertise and business students exploring careers in health care—learn to work together.
“Some of my students are pharmacy directors or managers and they know pharmacy really well; they’re taking on more management on a bigger profile at their work. But pharmacy school doesn’t teach you about HR or budgeting or how you work on organizational culture and change,” she said. “Then I have some students who are extremely interested in getting into health care.
“The work I do is always about creating solutions—whether it is streamlining processes, reducing burnout or giving students the tools to lead.”
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