Dr. Lisa A. Mills has been a consultant in the field of disability for 32 years. She has lived and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. She is currently a consultant on Medicaid home and community-based services waivers, managed long-term services and supports for people with disabilities, value-based purchasing, the HCBS Settings Rule, Olmstead and Employment First systems change. She has worked in twenty-four different states over the past eighteen years under various contracts with state and federal government agencies, managed care organizations and provider associations. She consults with states and other entities on the design and implementation of innovative Medicaid waiver designs for people with disabilities. She also works with states on Medicaid waiver renewals, policy and rate/reimbursement models, supporting service provider capacity-building and engaging other publicly funded systems as critical partners with Medicaid.

Dr. Mills is passionate about the need to move all disability services beyond fee-for-service and simple milestone-based structures in order to support high quality, efficient service delivery and quality outcomes that can challenge the deep-seated culture of low expectations. She is also passionate about the need to distinguish quality from compliance in moving the system toward accountability for performance.

Since 2006, Dr. Mills has had the opportunity to work intensively with a highly varied group of states, including states using MLTSS. Lisa lives in Wisconsin where she served as a policy consultant for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services from 2006-2012, returning from 2018-2020 to assist with waiver amendments. Dr. Mills also spent more than a decade as a consultant to Inclusa, Wisconsin’s largest MLTSS organization which is now part of Humana. Her work with Inclusa focused on value-based purchasing to advance employment and supported living. Lisa also worked intensively with Tennessee Medicaid on the creation of the Employment and Community First CHOICES MLTSS program and significant reforms addressing employment and day services in Tennessee’s three 1915c waivers, including value and outcome-based reimbursement components. Since 2015, Dr. Mills has also worked as a consultant in Michigan’s managed care system, assisting PIHPs to join with providers in learning about and designing value-based purchasing strategies in the state’s MLTSS system. Outside of managed care, Lisa has worked with the state of Maine since 2019, leading its HCBS compliance initiative and now acting as lead SME for its development of an innovative Lifespan waiver. Dr. Mills is also committed to making these systems changes successful in the deep south, having served as SME to the Alabama Department of Mental Health since 2018, assisting with changing rate structures to advance community integration and HCBS settings rule compliance, and helping the state create one of the first 1115/1915c combination waivers focused on keeping families together, eliminating waiting lists, supporting gainful employment and enhancing self-direction while also reducing per-person costs, critical incident rates and over-reliance on group homes.

Dr. Mills and her partner adopted two sons from Guatemala and as a result, she now has a personal experience of being the parent of a son with an intellectual disability who has become a successful artist and an Educator at Lululemon, with the help of supported employment services.