The LTACH Leadership Institute
The Fellows Program
The Institute exists to be a reservoir of knowledge for the long-term acute care hospital field. Our Fellows are the people who fill it.
LTACH leadership knowledge has never had a home.
Long-term acute care hospitals operate under a regulatory, clinical, and financial model unlike any other setting in American healthcare. Yet the expertise required to run one well has lived almost entirely in the heads of the people doing it, passed between colleagues informally and lost when they retire.
The Fellows Program is how the Institute captures that expertise and gives it permanence. Fellows are appointed, not hired. They are recognized for what they already know and invited to shape how the field records it, teaches it, and holds itself to it.
A Fellow's work outlives the appointment. That is the point.
Three portfolios. One body of knowledge.
The Institute appoints Fellows across three portfolios. Each addresses a different dimension of what the field needs, and each draws on a different kind of expertise. Appointments are made to the portfolio that fits the Fellow's contribution, and a Fellow's portfolio may evolve across renewal terms.
Senior Fellows
Executive-level leaders shaping standards, competencies, and credential development.
Senior Fellows are seasoned LTACH executives whose careers give them a view of the whole enterprise: operations, compliance, workforce, finance, and the regulatory environment all at once. They help define what competent LTACH leadership actually looks like, and they carry that definition into the standards and competency frameworks the Institute maintains.
Typical Background
Chief executives, chief operating officers, chief nursing officers, chief financial officers, market and multi-site leaders, and senior corporate executives with substantial long-term acute care responsibility.
Clinical Fellows
Leaders advancing LTACH clinical practice, quality, and innovation.
Clinical Fellows work at the point where leadership decisions meet patient outcomes. They bring depth in the clinical realities that define this setting: prolonged mechanical ventilation and weaning, complex wound care, infection prevention in a high-acuity chronically critically ill population, care transitions, and the quality and survey readiness infrastructure that holds it all together.
Typical Background
Physicians, nurse leaders, respiratory and rehabilitation leaders, quality and infection prevention leaders, and clinical informatics leaders practicing in or serving long-term acute care.
Research Fellows
Scholars contributing to LTACH-specific research and evidence-based leadership.
Research Fellows address the evidence gap directly. The long-term acute care setting is chronically underrepresented in the health services and leadership literature, which leaves operators making consequential decisions on evidence borrowed from settings that do not resemble theirs. Research Fellows produce, review, and translate work that speaks to this setting on its own terms.
Typical Background
Faculty and doctoral-prepared researchers in health services research, nursing science, health administration, health policy, and health economics, along with practitioner-scholars conducting applied research inside operating LTACHs.
The work of a Fellow
Fellowship is an active appointment. Contribution is expected, and the form it takes is agreed with each Fellow at appointment based on their portfolio and their available time.
Recognition, standing, and a platform
Fellowship is an honorary appointment. It confers standing, not a position.
Fellows serve in an honorary capacity. Any compensated engagement is separate from the fellowship appointment, is governed by an individual written agreement, and is never tied to certification outcomes.
Appointment and term
A note on independence
The Institute maintains a strict separation between its knowledge work and its credentialing function. Fellows contribute to the field's body of knowledge. They do not participate in individual certification decisions, they do not control examination content or scoring outcomes, and no aspect of a fellowship appointment is contingent on the certification results of any candidate. Certification decisions rest exclusively with the independent Credentialing Board under its own governing documents.
Looking for a different way to contribute?
Fellowship is one of several ways experienced LTACH professionals work with the Institute. If your interest is specifically in building the certification itself, through job task analysis, item writing, item review, and standard setting, that work is done by our Subject Matter Expert panel and follows a separate application process.
Become a Subject Matter ExpertPut your experience where it will last.
If you have built your career in long-term acute care, the field needs what you know written down. Tell us about your work, or nominate a colleague whose expertise belongs on the record.