Maureen Reed is a physician who was the chair of the Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota, Director of the Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota, and Medical Director and Vice-President of the not-for-profit health care provider HealthPartners.
Background
Reed was born to a farming family that lost their farm in the Great Depression, and grew up in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, a small rural town in south-western Minnesota, where her mother Rose still lives. Her father worked at the local Ford dealership.
Education
Reed graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1975, from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1979, and did part of her medical training at the Virginia hospital in Minneapolis, completing her residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Minnesota in 1982.
Career
She initially announced that she would run as a Democrat in the sixth congressional district of Minnesota, United States of America in 2010, but withdrew. She has one sister. She served as president of Aspen Medical Group in 1992. In 1993, she was hired as the vice president and medical director of HealthPartners, a position she held until 2004.
She also continued to practice internal medicine on a part-time basis at the Fremont Community Clinic in north Minneapolis, a clinic serving primarily uninsured and under-insured patients.
During her tenure as vice president and medical director at HealthPartners (1993–2004), Reed created and implemented an outcomes-based payment approach (Outcomes Recognition Program) for primary care groups, specialty care groups and hospitals. She also led the team whose measurement efforts subsequently spawned the Minnesota Community Measurement.
That same team converted HealthPartners from a paper to an electronic medical management system. On one trip to Uganda, Maureen worked with local dairy farmers, developing a plan that allowed them to pool their resources, providing them with unprecedented access to health care.
The Minnesota Legislature appointed Reed to serve on the University of Minnesota"s Board of Regents in 1997 and 2003.
She was the vice chair of the audit committee (1997), vice chair of the Education Planning and Policy Committee (1997–1999), board vice chair (1999–2001), board chair (2001–2003), and chair of the Education Planning and Policy Committee (2003–2005). She served as the interim executive director of the Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota (an environmental non-profit organization which manages a land trust of 10,000 acres (40 km2) across the state) from May 2008 to November 2008. She was the Independence Party of Minnesota"s candidate for lieutenant governor in 2006.
Reed said she would run as a Democrat for the 6th Congressional District seat held by Republican Michele Bachmann, and that she had raised over one million dollars, but later withdrew.
Membership
Reed is a member of the Medical Reserve Corps and was deployed in the aftermaths of the 2005 Louisiana Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the 2007 Interstate 35-West bridge collapse.