Keith J. Mueller, Ph.D., is Head of the Department of Health Management and Policy, College of Public Health, and Gerhard Hartman Professor in Health Management and Policy, University of Iowa. He is also the Director of the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI) and its Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis, and Chair of the RUPRI Health Panel. Dr. Mueller currently serves on the Rural Health Advisory Committee in the Department of Veterans Affairs. He has served as President of the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) and as a member of the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and Human Services. He has also served on national advisory committees to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He has published more than 240 scholarly articles and policy papers, and received awards recognizing his research contributions from NRHA, RUPRI, and the University of Nebraska. In 2016, he received the University of Iowa Regents Award for Faculty Excellence. His PhD is in Political Science from The University of Arizona, and he completed a Robert Wood Johnson Faculty Fellowship with The Johns Hopkins University.

As Director of the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis Dr. Mueller has participated in projects specific to the CMMI Community Health Access and Rural Transformation (CHART) Model and the CMMI Frontier Extended Stay Clinic (FESC) and Frontier Community Health integration Project (FCHIP) Models. His role related to CHART was developing content for webinars hosted by the Rural Health Value team, attended by over 100 participants, designed to inform potential applicants of the requirements to qualify and content to sure was included in applications. For the FESC and FCHIP projects he assisted Dr. MacKinney (Deputy Director of the RUPRI Center) in designing assessments (which included site visits to the organizations implementing the initiatives) and writing the final reports. Dr. Mueller also served as a consultant during the first round of enrolling hospitals into the CMMI Pennsylvania Rural Health Model (PARHM), after helping the state with general education, as a keynote speaker in seminars designed to generate interest in the model. As Chair of the RUPRI Health Panel Dr. Mueller continues to lead analysis to understand the contributions of new innovations to advancing toward a high-performing rural health system.