Kimberly Buss

Bio

Dr. Kimberly Buss received her Master of Public Health in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, and attended Medical School and Residency in Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine. In her pursuit of advancing healthcare improvement, Dr. Buss obtained a Graduate Certificate in Population Health Management from Jefferson College of Population Health in 2021 and just completed a Master of Science in Health Policy and Law at University of California San Francisco and the University of California, Law, San Francisco.  She completed her master’s thesis on ambulatory clinical pharmacist care for chronic conditions.

Throughout her career, Dr. Buss has been actively involved in policy and advocacy. She was honored as Family Medicine Hero of the Year in California in 2023.  She is currently a board member of the Sacramento Valley Chapter of California Academy of Family Physicians (CAFP) and member of the CAFP statewide Legislative Affairs Committee.  She is the vice-chair of the Specialty Delegation Executive Committee at the California Medical Association (CMA) and a member of the Council on Health Professions and Quality of Care at CMA.  Previously she was president of the Sacramento Board of the American Diabetes Association where she chaired the California Capital World Diabetes Day Coalition.

Dr. Buss has worked at Sutter Health for 25 years.  As a family physician she managed primary care patients while she created and ran diabetes group appointments and team-based multi-disciplinary diabetes clinics in primary care offices.  She became the Diabetes Medical Director for the Sacramento Valley Region of Sutter Health, where she designed, implemented and ran diabetes and insulin management programs for 35,000 people living with diabetes.  In this role, she helped improve diabetes outcomes across the valley region.  She spearheaded the systemwide diabetes council for Sutter Health, where she helped write diabetes clinical standards, policies & procedures, and provided clinical oversight of the largest AADE-certified diabetes education program in the US at the time.  Through this work she became a clinical informatics expert for Sutter Health. She helped design & develop dashboards, patient modules, dynamic point-of-care decision-support tools, and population outreach systems in the Sutter Epic electronic health record, which touches 3 million patients in Northern California.

As a Population Health Medical Director at Sutter, Dr. Buss designed and directed systemwide heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, lipid and asthma disease management programs for over 50,000 patients, managing of RNs, pharmacists, dieticians, and support staff and spearheaded systemwide clinical care pathways and supported clinically integrated networks, value-based payment models, and advanced primary care transformation.  As part of that work, she helped design a virtual pharmacist clinic that outreaches to patients with heart failure to help initiate and titrate guideline directed medical therapy to achieve target doses and lowered cardiovascular hospitalization rates by 74%.  Dr. Buss now works for Sutter Health as a Physician Research Collaborator in the Center for Health System Research.

She continues to use her expertise and specialized training in chronic disease management, population health, and health policy to advance high-quality team-based ambulatory care and evidence-based clinical and policy decision-making.  She strives to optimize patient access, quality outcomes, health equity, and affordability, in order to improve the health of all people across California.

Education

• University of California San Francisco and University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco
  Master of Science. Health Policy & Law 2024

• Jefferson College of Population Health
  Population Health Management, Graduate Certificate 2021

• University of California, Davis, School of Medicine
  Family Medicine Residency 1998

• University of California, Davis, School of Medicine
  Doctor of Medicine 1995

• University of California, Berkeley
  Master of Public Health in Epidemiology and Biostatistics 1991

• Carleton College
  Bachelor of Arts, Biology 1987