About the Founder & CEO
Beth Ann Wright, J.D., OTR/L, CFE, is the Founder and CEO of Translational Education LLC, creator of the opusomni ecosystem, and inventor of the learning method embodied in the opusomni education platform. She is an attorney, an occupational therapist, and a certified fraud examiner. Throughout her career, Beth has wondered how individuals translate book knowledge into competent, practical, day to day skills. More curious is her interest in why performance sometimes breaks down despite adequate book knowledge, and even at times, prior successful performance under certain environmental conditions.
Beth most recently worked for Washington University in St. Louis, full-time at the Danforth Campus—University Compliance Office, a guest lecturer to the Olin School of Business, and as a Research Consultant to the School of Medicine, Department of Otolaryngology. She mentored newer compliance auditors in their efforts to gain skills to perform complex federal regulatory compliance audits. She guest lectured MBA students on health care fraud and mentored MBA students participating in the Taylor Community Consulting Project. She served as Project Director of a pilot project for innovations in education curriculum to M.D. and Ph.D. candidates, who were awarded a Fellowship or Traineeship to also pursue a Masters of Science in Clinical and Translational Research.
Back in 1991, Beth graduated magna cum laude from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a Bachelor of Science in Occupational Therapy. During her decade long practice as an occupational therapist, Beth evaluated and treated patients with a broad range of neurological disorders including Traumatic Brain Injury, Stroke, Cerebral Palsy, Autism, Down’s Syndrome, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Developmental Delay, Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and Multiple Sclerosis. She studied and applied state-of-the-art cognitive theories, neuro-rehabilitation approaches, and methods to improve occupational performance with her neurologically impaired patients. Beth also worked with a wide variety of patients with orthopedic injuries who needed education and training to perform daily life skills with compensatory strategies or adaptive equipment, exercise regimes, safety precautions, and injury prevention training. The orthopedic populations which Beth evaluated and treated included total joint replacements of the hip, knee, and shoulder, fractures, amputations, tendon repairs, hand injuries, cumulative trauma disorders, and rheumatoid arthritis. Here too, patients could frequently state that they had learned their educational materials, but demonstrated difficulty during performance of the task in an authentic environment, especially under varied conditions. Her goal as an occupational therapist, of course, was to teach patients with both neurologic and orthopedic injuries how to perform daily tasks competently and proficiently within naturally occurring environments.
As is often the case in medicine, Beth also took students and junior practitioners under her wing to teach them the art of professional practice. Beth served as Director of Rehabilitation Services for the second largest integrated health care delivery system in North Carolina, Novant Health, and Director of Operations for the Long Term Care Division of a reputable, therapist-owned rehabilitation corporation, Ballard Therapy Services. As a master practitioner, she taught novice and intermediate level occupational therapists and occupational therapist assistants how to practice. Additionally, she taught occupational, physical, speech-language, audiology, and recreational therapists fundamentals for neuro-rehabilitation, evidence based practice, Medicare regulations, billing and documentation requirements, ethical practice, compliance with Joint Commission standards, leadership and management skills, continuous quality improvement initiatives, clinical care maps, healthcare financing and reimbursement mechanisms, and interdisciplinary care within an integrated delivery system. Here, presentation of book knowledge followed by experiential learning in the practice environment along with feedback and coaching yielded a talented group of therapists who achieved excellent rehabilitative outcomes when benchmarked against the best providers nationwide.
As a result of the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997, Beth had to reinvent herself and her role in medicine. She took a seemingly indirect route and went to Law School in 2001 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Beth graduated with Honors, served as an extern for the North Carolina Department of Justice—Office of Attorney General, a summer clerk for the health care practice group of Smith Moore, LLP, and a summer clerk for the Honorable Justice Mark Martin of the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Upon graduation from law school, she passed the Missouri Bar Exam and accepted a position at Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine—Program in Occupational Therapy as a lecturer and clinical manager. She taught Management in a Changing Health Practice Environment to OT Masters and Doctoral candidates. Beth has written numerous Law Reviews on health law and health policy topics including Health Care Antitrust Law, Disability Studies Theory, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Right to Refuse Medical Treatment. Her latest review, Preserving the Social Contract: Translating Academic Education into Professional Practice through Contemporary Cognitive Theories, creates a new applied life sciences meta-theory called Translational Education™.
During law school, she was very troubled to learn that one can become a lawyer and hang her shingle out there to practice without even one required hour of supervised practice by a member of the profession. And so began her odyssey to create a learning approach, based on her life’s work, and a few thousand additional hours of research and thinking over much of the next decade. Initially, of course, her goal was just to help law students acquire professional competency skills during their internships and clerkships. Soon after, she landed at Washington University where she was eventually befriended by an acute and critical care surgeon and medical resident educator, then learned about the paradigm shift occurring within medicine under the ACGME Outcome Project. She continued to refine her approach to address the needs of both professions. By 2008, as a member of a public elementary school Diversity Committee charged with narrowing the achievement gap, Beth believed that her learning approach could adapt and apply to K-12 public education. Later that same year, she learned that the National Institutes of Health, National Center for Research Resources, had led a public-private task force to enumerate core competency skills and ethical behaviors for Clinical and Translational Research Scientists. Strikingly, Beth believed that this learning approach that might drive acquistion of second grade math skills might also drive acquisition of clinical and translational research skills for some of the best and brightest minds in America. She was blessed to find a gifted surgeon-professor-research scientist to serve as her mentor for the pilot project. Continuing to hammer away at it, in 2010, Beth discovered that her evolving learning approach applied to every competency-based education program she tested against the model. She also, quite serendipitously, discovered that the learning model applied to health and well-being “competencies” resembling elements of the therepeutic goals and plans of care that she implemented with her patients and caregivers as an occupational therapist. From there, she could easily see the application to general populations, along the World Health Organization’s continuum of health, who live in communities with varying degrees of health and chronic illness. Wow! This is the way to change lives—to put knowledge in people’s pockets, and give them experiences where they live their everyday lives to improve their education, work, health and well-being.
On a personal note, Beth was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and is one of six children. She is the loving mother of one son, Harrison, who is a fifth grader attending public school. Beth served on the Diversity Committee at her son’s elementary school, and dedicated her time as a volunteer to coach YMCA soccer, served as a Den Leader to Cub Scouts, and served as a Mock Trial Coach to students of Cor Jesu Academy, her alma mater. Beth and her son are active parishioners at their Church. Beth is an avid gardener, a creative cook, and a loyal friend. She loves reading, research and writing, biking the Katy Trail, tasting wine from around the world, attending art festivals and visiting galleries, developing her very novice tennis game, power walking, watching her son play baseball, soccer, and basketball, and spending time with family.
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✦About opusomni
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✦About Purple Forest
opusomniTM
