Two University of Colorado Anschutz faculty members have been named fellows for the 2026-2027 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellows (RWJF) program, which mentors and then matches health care experts with key policy decisionsmakers in Washington, D.C.
Lauren S. Hughes, MD, MPH, MsC, FAAFP, professor of family medicine at the CU Anschutz School of Medicine and state policy director at the Eugene S. Farley Jr. Health Policy Center, and Denise C. Smith, PhD, CNM, FACNM, assistant professor at the College of Nursing, who directs the Colorado Rural Midwifery Workforce program, will spend the next year with the fellowship program.
Hughes, Smith, and the rest of the cohort from across the country will undergo an immersive orientation where they’ll meet with various governmental, political, and policy leaders before being placed in the federal legislative or executive branch to serve as a senior adviser.
Rural roots
Both Hughes and Smith have an existing foundation in health policy and a passion for delivering quality care to rural communities.
Hughes, a former RWJF Clinical Scholar, previously served as deputy secretary for Health Innovation in the Pennsylvania Department of Health where she helped implement statewide strategies to improve health. She oversaw the launch of the Pennsylvania Prescription Drug Monitoring Program that aimed to help curb the opioid and heroin epidemic.
Much of her work, especially around improving health systems in rural communities, stems from her upbringing.
“I thought that growing up in Iowa I was going to be a full-scope rural Iowa family doctor,” Hughes says. “Eleven years ago, I started my previous role in state government. I had the incredible opportunity to dive into rural health policy to design and launch the Pennsylvania Rural Health Model, a new payment and delivery model focused on rural hospitals. Over the past decade, I've had the chance to reengage in rural health, not entirely from a clinical or an operational perspective, but from a policy perspective.”
At the Farley Health Policy Center, Hughes has worked on behavioral health projects in rural communities in Kansas, developed a playbook on lessons learned from rural primary care practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, and participated in policy research focused on strengthening rural and frontier hospitals across Colorado.
Smith, who was raised in rural Illinois, has been a midwife for nearly 20 years, half of that time working with the CU Anschutz College of Nursing. Prior to joining CU Anschutz, she served in the U.S. Armed Services Nurse Corps as an officer and midwife.
In her role as project director of the Colorado Midwifery Workforce Expansion program, she helps train midwives for rural care and works to address barriers to maternal care in those communities. In the midwifery clinical practice at CU Anschutz, she provides maternity care to the surrounding community.
In 2023, her policy work was vital in the move to license certified midwives in Colorado. These graduate-prepared midwives can provide pregnancy, gynecologic, family planning, and primary care to women and care for healthy newborns in the first 28 days of life. That work has also resulted in the addition of a new graduate program in midwifery at CU Anschutz.
From 2016 to 2020, she served as specialty director for the Nurse-Midwifery Education Program at CU Anschutz.
‘We have a lot to offer’
Both bring a unique perspective to the fellowship.
Nurses are the largest component of the health care delivery system, “So, we have a lot to offer,” Smith says. “Nurses need to have a voice in policy conversations because there are many big questions that we can help solve.”
“There are multiple angles we can take to apply how we think about policy. At CU Anschutz, we represent workforce, education, health care delivery, and research — and policy plays a role in each of those pillars,” she says.
Hughes says she’s eager to hone her policy skills and apply them to federal-specific programs and issues — both of which often impact the work she’s done at the state and local level.
“My state-level policy experience and the insights I’ve gained doing that work are what I look forward to sharing with my colleagues and employing at the federal level,” she says. “Skills such as convening stakeholders and decision-makers to decide a path forward can be used at any level of policy work.”
A year and beyond
After a year in Washington, D.C., Hughes and Smith hope to bring their education in the policy realm back to the CU Anschutz campus to teach others and expand their reach.
“I really look forward to leveraging my experience and what I've learned to make a real and tangible difference in state policy here in Colorado and in the Mountain West,” Hughes says.
For Smith, empowering her field of work in maternal health care is a major personal goal with the fellowship program.
“We're the premier education institution for nurses and midwives in Colorado, so it's a big goal of mine to bring what I learn to the students,” Smith says. “It’s one thing to incorporate more policy into the research I do — I always say that research starts with policy and ends with policy —but I think there's a part of it that I want to bring to academia.”
