Alexa Ortiz

Alexa Ortiz, MSN, RN is a health communication strategist who is passionate about the creation, dissemination, adoption, and evaluation of public health interventions that address patient educational needs and target gaps within the current U.S. health care system. As a registered nurse with several years of experience in inpatient and outpatient care, Ms. Ortiz has firsthand knowledge of how effective communication-focused interventions can address barriers to care and improve patient outcomes.

Ms. Ortiz’s prior work includes developing a dissemination strategy as well as overseeing the development and distribution of multimedia communication materials for Community Benefit Insight, is a web-based tool that enables hospitals, communities, and members of the public to examine hospitals’ community benefit spending allocations. Ms. Ortiz has also contributed as a clinic liaison to the multisite implementation and mixed-methods evaluation of Positive Health Check, a video counseling intervention that delivered highly tailored prevention messages to people living with HIV during their primary care clinic appointments.

Ms. Ortiz currently leads the media relations task for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) where she oversees securing relevant media exposure about NHANES. NHANES is administered by the National Center for Health Statistics, under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and is designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children across the United States. Ms. Ortiz also serves as the primary clinic liaison and qualitative analysis lead for the implementation evaluation of the Red Carpet Entry (RCE) program, a structural intervention that facilitates rapid linkage to HIV medical care, for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Her work on RCE is contributing to the creation of an implementation toolkit and digital training modules that will be used by CDC in preparation for large-scale implementation of RCE as an HIV care best practice. 

Ms. Ortiz joined RTI in 2015. Her notable publications include The Development and Management of Community Benefit Insight and Implementing web-based interventions in HIV primary care clinics, Effectiveness of an Interactive, Highly Tailored “Video Doctor” Intervention to Suppress Viral Load and Retain Patients With HIV in Clinical Care: A Randomized Clinical Trial.