Hunterdon Health

Decades of experience in patients' homes shaped Karla Gambrill's approach to healthcare leadership. Today, she serves as Director of Home Health at Hunterdon Health, where she builds the systems that support consistent patient care.

“What is best for our patients?”

For Karla Gambrill, that question comes before every strategy and decision.

Starting her journey as a field physical therapist, she learned that no two home visits looked alike. Patients needed care tailored to their own situation, and she needed a structure solid enough to trust her own judgment within it.

Over time, she noticed a pattern. When quality slipped, it was rarely the clinician's fault. It was usually the system asking too much without giving enough support. That pattern became the foundation of her leadership at Hunterdon, where she builds the education, processes and support that help clinicians deliver consistent, informed care in every home they enter.

Gambrill now sees home health as a team sport, where nurses, therapists, social workers, pharmacists, aides and office staff coordinate around each patient from day one. It is a mindset Hunterdon builds into orientation and carries into everyday practice.

Turning Quality Measures into Clinical Tools

One initiative Gambrill points to is how Hunterdon’s clinicians use the Outcome and Assessment Information Set, or OASIS.

Many clinicians treat it as routine paperwork to complete and file away. Gambrill pushed her teams to see it differently as a clinical tool that shows whether a patient can safely manage at home without help. Making that shift meant training clinicians in clinical reasoning and consistent scoring. An accurate OASIS score isn’t just a number. It directly shapes the care plan a patient receives, from the goals that are set to the support that follows.

Our goal has never been to improve scores on paper. Our goal is always to improve our patients’ lives.

Carrying that plan into a patient’s home takes more than one clinician. Nurses, therapists, social workers and other team members bring different skills to a case, but patients don't experience their care in separate lanes. They experience one healthcare journey. The coordination has produced more unified care plans and a stronger focus on helping patients regain independence.

For Gambrill, that shift became cultural. Clinicians started treating quality measures as feedback that sharpens care, with every score tied to helping patients live fuller, more independent lives at home. Clinicians who understand that purpose tend to produce stronger outcomes.

Preparing for a More Complex Future

All these initiatives face their biggest test as home health becomes harder to deliver. Patient acuity is climbing, reimbursement is shifting toward value-based models and workforce shortages, along with regulatory demands, are stretching the field thin.

Gambrill has focused Hunterdon’s response on clinician education, standardized best practices and reducing unnecessary variation in care. Together, these approaches give clinicians the knowledge and support to make sound, consistent decisions in every visit.

Hunterdon Health is also rolling out a new electronic medical record designed to improve communication, streamline workflows and free up more time for clinicians to spend with patients. For Gambrill, the future of home health depends on balancing these growing demands with the personal connection that makes home care different.

Building People Before Performance

The personal connection extends to how Gambrill leads her own team. Success goes beyond patient outcomes to the people who make those outcomes possible.

Gambrill has built a culture around curiosity, critical thinking and continuous improvement, encouraging clinicians to ask how every decision improves care for the patient in front of them. When clinicians understand the purpose behind clinical practices and quality measures, they think more critically and collaborate more naturally across disciplines as healthcare evolves.

That's the legacy Gambrill is building at Hunterdon, one that is measured not in quality outcomes and the number of patients served but in the clinicians she has helped develop and the teams she has shaped. To her, leadership means creating an environment where people keep learning, support one another and return to the question she has staked her career on—“What is best for our patients?”