For Abstractors. By Abstractors. Better Data. Better Care.
Meet Our Co-Founders
Brandy and Kate
Get to Know Brandy Greif, Co-Founder
Brandy’s journey into clinical data abstraction wasn’t something she planned—it was a career path she discovered along the way and quickly grew to love. With a background in nursing and years of experience in clinical quality, registry abstraction, auditing, training, and healthcare technology, she has developed a particular passion for the people behind the data: the abstractors.
Known for asking questions, digging into guidelines, and rarely accepting “that’s just how we’ve always done it” as an answer, Brandy believes that abstractors do some of the most important—and often least recognized—work in healthcare quality. She is passionate about education, consistency, collaboration, and creating spaces where people feel comfortable asking questions, sharing what they know, and admitting when they don’t know the answer.
That passion is ultimately what led to QDAA. After years of meeting talented abstractors across organizations and registries, Brandy saw how often people were working through the same complicated questions in isolation. She believed abstractors deserved a place of their own—a community where experience could be shared, different interpretations could be discussed, and no one had to feel like they were figuring it all out alone.
Outside of work, Brandy is a mom of two, a son Jacob and a daughter Kylee, and a very proud dog mom of two German Shorthaired Pointers Dixie Rose and Bella Rae. She resides in Central Pennsylvania with her boyfriend Todd, where they enjoy camping, floating on the river, and hosting get togethers for friends and family. Brandy enjoys traveling, visiting her son, his wife and their 4 dogs (her granddogs) at their home in New Hampshire, and visiting her daughter, and her boyfriend in Port Orange, Florida. She loves her family fiercely, has a sense of humor that tends to find its way into just about everything she does, and believes that professionalism and personality don't have to be mutually exclusive.
At the heart of it all, Brandy is an educator, a lifelong learner, and an advocate for the abstractor profession. Her hope for QDAA is simple: to help abstractors feel connected, supported, valued, and proud of the work they do.
For Abstractors. By Abstractors. Better Data. Better Care.
Published Work
Overcoming the fear of health care AI in data abstraction — KevinMD
Get to Know Kate Schuman, Co-Founder
Kate didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a clinical data abstractor—mostly because, like most people, she had no idea that was a thing. Her career in healthcare took a few turns before eventually leading her to quality improvement and clinical data abstraction, where she discovered a world of complicated guidelines, imperfect documentation, and questions that sometimes have the incredibly satisfying answer of “it depends.”
She loved it.
If there’s one thing to know about Kate, it’s that “close enough” makes her more than a little itchy. She is endlessly curious, incredibly detail-oriented, and almost incapable of finding something that doesn’t make sense without needing to figure out why. Give her an unusual case, two seemingly contradictory guidelines, and an obscure footnote buried somewhere deep in a manual, and she’s probably happier than she was five minutes ago.
Kate believes that asking questions is a strength—not an admission that you don’t know enough. Some of the best conversations in abstraction begin with “Okay, but hear me out…” And after years of working in healthcare quality, abstraction, auditing, and healthcare technology, she knows that even the most experienced abstractors sometimes need another person to look at a case and say, “Yep. I see why you’re asking.”
That mindset is a huge part of why QDAA matters to her. Abstractors spend their days making sense of documentation that wasn't written with abstraction in mind while applying complex guidelines to real patients who don't always fit neatly into predefined boxes. Kate wanted to help create a place where abstractors could bring the weird cases, challenge an interpretation, share what they’ve learned, and ask the question they’ve been staring at for twenty minutes without wondering whether they’re the only person who doesn’t know the answer.
She also has a particular talent for breaking things—usually not literally. Give Kate a new system, workflow, or piece of technology and she will somehow find the edge case nobody thought to test. It isn't so much an attempt to cause problems as an uncontrollable need to know what happens when you push the button you're probably not supposed to push. As it turns out, that's a pretty useful quality in both abstraction and healthcare technology.
Outside of work, Kate is a mom to three girls and shares her home with two Labradors and a cat named Harry Styles—which probably tells you at least a little about what comes next. She is a lifelong South Jersey girl, an unapologetic Taylor Swift fan with what some might consider an arguably unnecessary amount of Taylor Swift merchandise, a lover of over-the-top holiday decorations, and a firm believer that humor makes almost everything better.
Kate’s personality has a tendency to show up wherever she goes, and she sees no reason professionalism should require leaving it at the door.
At the heart of it all, Kate believes abstractors deserve more than instructions and specifications. They deserve context, conversation, resources, recognition, and a community of people who understand the expertise their work requires. Her hope for QDAA is that it becomes exactly that—a place where abstractors can ask the weird question, teach each other something new, laugh when appropriate, and leave feeling a little more confident and a lot less alone.
For Abstractors. By Abstractors. Better Data. Better Care.