2025 Health Care Champions Administrator: Katie Towns

The goal of public health is to head off illness and injury before they can happen, across entire communities. Katie Towns, director of Springfield-Greene County Health Department, has been leaning into that work in myriad roles, particularly since July 2021.

That’s when she started leading the Springfield-Greene County Health Department, amid the area’s delta variant outbreak during the COVID pandemic four years ago. Towns calls that time “one of the hardest challenges I have faced in life.”

She says, “Through these most difficult circumstances comes a chance to learn from experience that gives us chances to gain knowledge that cannot be found in times of comfort.”

Community leaders credit her nimbleness for navigating those uncertainties.

“Katie Towns has led Springfield-Greene County Health for just over four years, after stepping into the role at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” says David Cameron, Springfield city manager. “She demonstrates an ability to lead through a crisis, and she’s learned through tremendous challenges and tension that it is vital to bridge gaps and look for opportunities to overcome division.”

Building bridges with health care partners and the community is central to Towns’ approach to leadership.

“We believe that where there is common ground and where we are able to align work to address concerns, there is power in the ability to address and accomplish improvements toward those concerns,” she says.

Collaboration continues in recent times as it did during the pandemic. For example, every three years, Towns and the Health Department lead a community-wide health data assessment. Carried out in concert with CoxHealth, Mercy Springfield Communities and Burrell Behavioral Health, the assessment yields a unified report with a single list of priorities for improving community outcomes.

Towns says the campaigns that come out of the assessment are “passion projects.” They include efforts to reduce the stigma associated with seeking mental health care and new efforts to scrutinize overdose deaths and ways to reduce them, among other undertakings.

Last year, the Health Department launched another collaboration, Family Connects. This program delivers a nurse home visit at no cost for every baby born in Greene County, offering health screenings and connecting families to community resources.

“Establishing a strong home foundation for families can be the best prevention for mental illness and chronic diseases later in life,” Towns says.

Prioritizing people in this way characterizes the leadership Towns advocates for, both when delivering services that promote health in the community and in managing her health department team.

“We ask questions together, we build relationships with partners that might not have been typical partners in past work, we find ways to look for ‘yes’ when the system is telling us our ideas won’t fit,” Towns says.