Designing Coordinated Systems of Services to Benefit Seniors | FUSE

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Long Beach has a large, diverse, and vibrant senior population, which is expected to grow significantly over the next decade. The city’s Community Health Bureau partnered with FUSE Executive Fellow Karen Doolittle to help Long Beach improve quality of life for senior residents by linking them to a more coordinated continuum of care.

Karen conducted extensive primary and secondary research to identify gaps in programming for the city’s aging population and develop more comprehensive approaches to meeting their needs. To better understand the landscape of available resources, she produced a series of heat maps showing where service providers were located throughout the city, and cross-referenced this data with the senior population by zip code and income level. Karen provided strategic direction across a range of initiatives, including the establishment of the city’s new Healthy Aging Center, and supported the rollout and adoption of an online referral system that further streamlines the referral process for seniors in need of services. These and other efforts helped advance Long Beach’s goal to be one of the most livable cities for seniors.

KAREN DOOLITTLE (2017-18) leverages two decades of experience in consulting and program and project management to identify opportunities and solve problems across functions and industries. As an engagement manager at Ernst & Young, Karen developed strategies and transformed the end-to-end experience for customers. While managing multi-unit operations at PepsiCo, she achieved top three nationwide key performance indicators. Previously, Karen served as an Air Force officer, directing a hospital nutrition department that produced 75,000 meals annually, and providing inpatient and outpatient clinical nutrition services. Karen earned a B.S. in nutrition and food science from Virginia Tech, and an MBA in strategy and operations management from The Anderson School at UCLA.

Karen Doolittle

2017-2018 | City of Long Beach - Department of Health and Human Services

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