Bulletin
Kathy Craig BW’02
Putting Together an “Unusual Package”
“We were busy beyond fun,” said Kathy
Craig BW’02
of why she and her husband, Larry Greller, chucked their corporate
jobs and moved to Canada in February of 2001. “Working for
large corporations for 15 years left us burnt out; we wanted to
dial back.” Larry wanted to take a job with a small biotech
firm located in Kingston, Ontario, and Kathy figured her job was
portable. Turns out that, thanks in large part to Canada’s
immigration laws, it wasn’t, and it took Kathy four years
to gain the permanent residency status she needed to work.
Besides being restricted from practicing her professional work for so long, Kathy ran into difficulties getting hired in ancillary arenas, too. But it wasn’t simply her hiatus that caused problems, it was also what one employer described as an “unusual package”—her background in nursing, case management, and biomedical writing.
Kathy had started her college career as a journalism major, then switched to nursing. After 15 years of nursing—some of it as a traveling nurse, some in psychiatrics—Kathy moved into case management, which she considers “advanced practice nursing.” Case managers “help people navigate the healthcare system and get the care they need in a fragmented system,” says Kathy. “You martial the system on behalf of the client.”
Experimental and investigational treatments and protocols were Kathy’s specialties as a case manager. While working for Intracorp’s Center for Clinical Outcomes and Guidelines, she helped research and write the guidelines for three national services they offered: case management, a 24-hour nurse call line, and experimental technologies. She also achieved an originator’s copyright for the company’s Case Management Acuity Tool Kit©.
At this time she began to nurture her “writing bug,” as she called it, outside of the office. She wrote articles for Nursing Spectrum and other journals. An article in Advance for Radiologists in 2000 on the reuse of single-use devices even brought her a commendation from the FDA, citing her “excellent grasp of the issue” and “well-written articles.”
While at Intracorp, Kathy started working on her master’s in health administration. Halfway through the program, she became intrigued by the inaugural biomedical writing program the College of Pharmacy and Sciences in Philadelphia launched through the College of Graduate Studies, and she transferred. “I didn’t regret it for a minute; it was a perfect fit.” Kathy finished the last credits of the USP master’s program from Canada but returned to attend her graduation in Philadelphia. “A photo of me in the Kimmel Center with the Philadelphia skyline behind me is displayed in my office and is still an inspiration.”
When no one hired her during her 4-year permanent residency wait, Kathy took the initiative and started her own company, Craig Research Continuum. Among other projects, she contributed as referee for Cochrane Collaboration meta-analyses and performed substantive editing of evidenced-based monographs for the Ontario Ministry of Health, returning to experimental and investigational work.
Opportunities to speak and write on case management tools and processes began to multiply. In 2007 Kathy became a member of the board of directors for the National Case Management Network in Canada, a member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed Professional Case Management journal, and served on caseload work groups for the Case Management Society of America (CMSA). She also participated as an advisor for a joint CMSA and URAC (Utilization Review Advisory Committee) international panel on trans-world border issues in healthcare provision and coordination.
Kathy has expanded her company into the U.S. as part of Schooner Healthcare Services, based in Annapolis, Maryland. She provides consulting services and developed eQuity Workflow SolutionsTM, an electronic case management tool with validated inter-rater reliability for assigning acuity scores that translate qualitative clinical judgments into reportable quantitative data.
Kathy and her husband are now looking into establishing dual Canadian/U.S. citizenship so that no matter where her business takes her, she can live and work without hassle. Kathy is still busy—speaking, writing, and running a business—but apparently, it’s fun now, and there’s no need to dial back.
To learn more, visit www.schoonerhealth.com/Craig_Research_Continuum__.html
by Carol R. Cool