About

Claudia M. Rausch

Healthcare Policy & Regulatory Compliance Consultant

Claudia M. Rausch brings 15 years of healthcare policy and regulatory experience — including 12 years serving the federal government across VA healthcare operations and the National Practitioner Data Bank. She works with licensed health care practitioners, hospitals, medical executive committees, legal counsel, and regulatory bodies navigating the federal systems that govern licensure, credentialing, and professional accountability. She also works with individuals, families, and members of the public navigating situations involving licensed health care practitioners or healthcare institutions — including patient rights, HIPAA, institutional complaints, and regulatory review of medical opinions — helping translate what the rules actually require into language that is clear, structured, and actionable. She does not offer generic compliance advice — she offers applied knowledge built from 15 years inside the systems themselves.

Federal Policy Experience

Inside the NPDB — 7 Years

For 7 years, Claudia served as a Management Analyst and policy expert at the National Practitioner Data Bank — the federal system that holds the permanent professional record of every licensed clinician in the United States. She led and participated in improvement projects of national impact serving over 500,000 constituents and stakeholders, including healthcare organizations, legislators, policymakers, and public interest groups.

She managed and oversaw routine updates to the NPDB Guidebook — the primary interpretive resource used by hospitals and Medical Staff Services Offices nationwide to understand their federal reporting and querying obligations. She drafted rulings on behalf of the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and responses to high-level congressional inquiries. She served as policy subject matter expert on NPDB regulatory requirements — conducting complex research to anticipate, shape, and execute responses and far-reaching strategies that ensured the most effective use of government resources. She trained NPDB staff on Six Sigma methodology, advanced stakeholder analysis, and strategic planning techniques for education and outreach initiatives.

Her 2019 Education and Outreach Action Team — which she led — delivered the most highly attended webcast series in the entire agency of the Health Resources and Services Administration. She was recognized as a Finalist in the HHS IDEA Lab Ignite Accelerator Innovation Competition — issued by the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services — for her work reimagining alternative medical malpractice dispute models. She was further recognized by NPDB leadership for implementing a cost-saving Six Sigma tool to guide prioritization of NPDB projects.

Operational Leadership

Inside Hospital Systems — 8 Years

Before her NPDB role, Claudia built an eight-year operational career across federal and private healthcare systems — serving in progressive leadership roles in credentialing, privileging, and Medical Staff Services operations across institutions of varying size and complexity.

Her most senior hospital role was Director of Credentialing and Privileging at VA Puget Sound — a Level 1A high-complexity tertiary system comprising two major hospital campuses, five clinics, 397 beds, and 3,300 employees. She led a team of 11 and oversaw credentialing and privileging for 1,200+ physicians across 39 clinical specialties and approximately 3,000 clinicians total. Prior to that, she served as Health Systems Specialist and Credentials Manager at the El Paso VA Health Care System, where she developed and implemented a centralized ongoing performance evaluation program across nine clinical service areas — enabling Medical Staff leadership to monitor, assess, and correct physician performance facility-wide.

She has sat in hundreds of Medical Executive Committee meetings and understands precisely how privileging decisions are made across the full spectrum of clinical specialties. Her track record of zero findings across five Joint Commission surveys — encompassing the full scope of Joint Commission Medical Staff Standards, including credentialing and privileging, Medical Staff bylaws compliance, and MEC governance over peer review and privileging processes — along with two VA OIG Combined Assessment Program reviews and CARF accreditation surveys, spanning multiple healthcare systems over an eight-year period, represents not just personal expertise, but the institutional risk mitigation that hospital leadership depends on when regulatory scrutiny is highest.

Recognition & Leadership

Finalist, HHS IDEA Lab Ignite Accelerator Innovation Competition — Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services
Keynote Speaker, Association for Women in Communications — Seattle Professional Chapter
"4 Under 40" Honoree and Speaker, ALPFA Seattle
Federal supervisor across two VA healthcare systems

Methodology & Education

Claudia led LEAN Six Sigma Black Belt initiatives recognized at the regional level for best practices and internal controls — and applies process improvement discipline across all engagements to identify gaps, eliminate inefficiencies, and build systems that perform under scrutiny. She pursued graduate studies in Organizational Psychology at the University of London.

She has spent 7 years inside the National Practitioner Data Bank — the federal system that holds the permanent record of every licensed clinician in the country — and 8 years inside the hospital systems that query it, respond to it, and build their compliance programs around it. She has worked on both sides of the federal reporting relationship that most healthcare institutions only ever see from one direction. That depth of cross-institutional knowledge is what she brings to every engagement — whether the client is a licensed practitioner managing exposure, a hospital preparing for scrutiny, an attorney requiring regulatory analysis, or an individual navigating a system that was not designed to be legible to outsiders.

Consultations are strictly confidential.