Kimbah Healthcare Solutions

Kimberly Madden is the founder and principal consultant of Kimbah Healthcare Solutions, a practice built to strengthen how tribal and rural health organizations deliver care. She works alongside tribal health centers, Indian Health Service facilities, Public Law 93-638 self-determination programs, and federally qualified health centers to redesign Purchased/Referred Care (PRC) operations, build integrated high-risk care coordination, develop the public health nursing workforce, and manage the federal grants that sustain this work.Her approach begins from a different question than most of healthcare asks. Most of care is built around one question — what is making this person sick? — and that work matters, but it is only half the picture. Kimberly starts from the opposite question, drawn from the theory of salutogenesis: what keeps a person well? Health, in this view, is something we actively create and sustain, not simply the absence of disease.Underneath everything, a person who is sick or scared is really asking three things: Does this matter to me? Do I understand what is happening? Do I have what I need to handle it? Kimberly's work is about getting to "yes" on all three — in that order, beginning with meaning. And meaning cannot be separated from culture. For Diné (Navajo) patients, meaning lives in Hózhó: balance, harmony, walking in beauty, being in right relationship with body, mind, spirit, family, and land. So she does not begin with the disease; she begins where a community already understands wellness to live. Culture is not sensitivity training added at the end — it is the foundation the whole system is built on. That conviction is the heart of the Madden Salutogenic Coherence Practice Model (MSCPM ©2012) and its patient- and community-facing companion, Journey to Salutogenesis (©2012): a systems-level framework for care coordination that is culturally grounded from the ground up and coherent from end to end.Over more than twenty years, Kimberly has built and rebuilt care-delivery systems across public health, community health, acute care, and federal health settings — redesigning underperforming departments, launching and directing multimillion-dollar grant-funded programs, and driving quality and regulatory compliance across complex, multi-site organizations. Her clinical roots as a registered nurse and public health nurse keep every system she designs anchored in what actually reaches the patient. Her current work includes leading a full Purchased/Referred Care redesign for a tribally operated IHS 638 ambulatory health center in New Mexico, alongside the integrated care coordination, quality, and compliance infrastructure that supports its diabetes program and broader grant portfolio.She holds a Master of Science in Nursing and is a Registered Nurse and Public Health Nurse in New Mexico; she is currently pursuing a Doctor of Health Administration (DHA). Her scholarship on salutogenesis and culturally grounded care spans peer-reviewed publication and national conference presentation, with the earliest published expression of her framework dating to 2008.Across every engagement, Kimberly's aim is the same: to help the communities she serves restore balance and sustain their own wellness — one coherent system at a time.This work carries forward the teachers who shaped it. In her first semester of nursing school at UT Health San Antonio, Kimberly's clinical instructor, Dr. Arevalo, opened the door — introducing her to Dr. Carrie Jo Braden and the Research Scholars Program. Dr. Braden became her mentor and the foundation of how she understands uncertainty in illness, self-help, resilience, and salutogenesis. Dr. Lesser, her mental health nursing professor, worked closely with prosumers and embraced community-centered care, including with Indigenous communities. And an elective led by Dr. Jill Hayes first brought her to Chinle, Arizona, where a clinical day with Darlene began the relationship that would ground her life's work.

Founder & Principal Consultant