Tara Montgomery is a change leadership advisor, academic practitioner, and social entrepreneur who works at the intersection of trust, governance, and public engagement in health care. As Principal of Civic Health Partners, an independent consulting practice that she founded in 2017, Tara helps purpose-driven organizations build trustworthy leadership and public engagement strategies. An EMCC-accredited coach at the Senior Practitioner level, she facilitates conversations with health and social impact leaders navigating complexity, change, adaptive leadership, and political challenges.
Tara’s identity as a patient and public-interest advocate was forged over 14 years in senior leadership roles at Consumer Reports, the world’s largest nonprofit, nonpartisan consumer organization. As Senior Director of Health Impact, she led a team of 18 researchers, journalists, and advocates to advance marketplace transparency, safety, affordability, and accountability in health care, and directed the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, providing public reporting on hospital safety, drug costs, and the value of health services.
She partnered with the ABIM Foundation to launch the public engagement effort for Choosing Wisely, a national campaign to reduce unnecessary and wasteful care, and steered a multi-year public education and advocacy campaign on antibiotic resistance in coordination with the CDC and the White House. As Director of Health Partnerships, she built a network of 60 partner organizations and secured millions of dollars in grant funding to advance consumer health outcomes. Across these roles, her teams reached an estimated 100 million consumers a year with unbiased, evidence-based health information.
Tara brings substantial experience in the governance of health, nonprofit, and cooperative organizations in both consultant and volunteer roles. From 2017-2020 she served as co-chair of PatientsLikeMe’s Ethics and Compliance Advisory Board. From 2019 to 2024, she served as a Public Member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), including two years as Chair of the Public Member Caucus, and as a member of the Executive Committee, the Ethics and Professionalism Committee, the Committee on Continuing Certification, and the Health Policy and Strategy Committee. In that role, she helped bring patient voices to the oversight of board certification standards for nearly one million U.S. physicians across 24 medical specialties.
Tara is the recipient of the Benjamin Shimberg Public Service Award from the Institute for Credentialing Excellence, recognizing her work as a patient advocate. She remains engaged in patient advocacy through the Patient Advocate Foundation and is active in patient safety communities.
Her research on trust in the U.S. leadership response to COVID-19 informs her writing and speaking on trustworthy systems leadership; her work has appeared in JAMA, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, BMJ Opinion, and the AMA Journal of Ethics podcast. She contributes patient-centered perspectives on the ethical use of patient data and trustworthy AI to to the Coalition for Health AI, Duke Health, and AHIMA.
Tara recently completed a three-year appointment as Executive in Residence at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, where she contributed to the MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership and collaborated with the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. She holds a Specialized Master’s in Consulting and Coaching for Change from HEC Paris and Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and a B.A. (Hons) in French with Management Studies from King’s College London.