Jordina Shanks joined Fenway Health as Chief Operating Officer in 2021 and is now serving as Interim CEO. Shanks brings over 20 years of experience designing and overseeing operational systems across primary care, specialty, and non-clinical areas that have enabled effective and efficient delivery of quality clinical care. Prior to joining Fenway, Shanks was Chief Operating Officer at Mattapan Community Health Center, where she held broad strategic responsibility across all departments and served as the compliance officer.
Shanks is a nurse and a healthcare systems expert who has designed and implemented numerous initiatives that increase patient and provider satisfaction, sustain profitability, and improve safety and quality. She employs a data-driven approach to assessing issues and concerns, encourages innovative solutions and holds racial and health equity at the center of all business decisions.
Shanks’s professional career in health care, which began in 1990 on the surgical unit at Morton Hospital in Taunton where she worked as a nurse, has been driven by her personal experiences of early family loss entangled with poverty and homophobia. As a result, she has dedicated her career to improving the health and well-being of as many people as possible, while addressing health disparities for marginalized communities.
In 2000, Shanks began a 17-year career at Harvard Vanguard where she was hired as an urgent care clinical supervisor and progressively managed more and more clinical departments and areas of the business until she achieved her goal of running operations for a health center. In her last seven years there, Shanks was a practice administrator managing two multi-specialty health care centers where she oversaw 100 physicians and 440 clinical and administrative employees responsible for providing care to 41,000 patients.
In 2017, Shanks joined Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts as Chief Operating Officer. There, she led the design and early stages of implementation of a multi-year strategic plan to improve the sexual and reproductive health outcomes of minoritized populations across the state through a racial equity lens.