Roberta Burkemper Shaw
Senior Vice President
With experience of more than 25 years in the nonprofit sector, Roberta has worked with organizations ranging from academic medical centers to community health clinics; colleges to foundations; health insurance plans to coalition advocacy groups; and member-based trade organizations. Clients value her thoughtful, audience-focused strategic approach to public positioning, issues communications, and reputation management.
Roberta is particularly experienced in working with multiple entities seeking to achieve a common goal through communications. Her ability to listen to and understand different perspectives and to accommodate those perspectives in a goal-oriented approach to communications achieves results, including:
- Fostering engagement and alignment between a large regional hospital system and its 800-member medical staff, leading to approval of a new, joint governance structure and laying the foundation to become an integrated accountable care organization.
- Attaining significant media coverage for a coalition of community hospitals working to explain and expose the impact of underfunding by public payers on hospitals and the communities they serve.
- Successfully preparing a community for the closing of a local emergency medical service and positioning a new service alternative within the community.
Prior to joining Denterlein, Roberta served as director of public affairs at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School’s largest psychiatric teaching hospital, where she developed and implemented communications efforts to maintain and grow McLean’s national reputation during significant workforce restructuring and sale of more than half the hospital’s excess property.
Additionally, she served on the first corporate communications team for Partners HealthCare, positioning and introducing the new multi-institutional, integrated healthcare system to both internal and external audiences.
Roberta’s previous experience includes communications planning around the nation’s first corporate-based intergenerational day care center, representation of the country’s largest provider of corporate work and family life programs, and restructuring the public relations office of one of Massachusetts’ leading academic medical centers.
Roberta holds a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and professional accreditation from the Public Relations Society of America.
