Melissa Dancer, RDN
Senior Consultant
Health Management Associates
Tallahassee, FL
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With more than 25 years of healthcare experience, Melissa Dancer’s expertise spans clinical nutrition, research, population health, corporate wellness, and hospital leadership. Adept in understanding the hospital and healthcare environment, Melissa provides the information and analysis clients need to support data-driven decision making and ultimately improve community and population health equity and outcomes.
Before joining Health Management Associates (HMA), Melissa was a project manager at a healthcare consulting firm specializing in tax-exempt hospital community benefit reporting, planning, and program development. In this role, she collaborated with hospital and public health clients, designing and implementing community benefit strategies, conducting customized, compliant community health needs assessments (CHNAs) to identify top health concerns, and creating actionable community health improvement plans to address identified priority health needs. Melissa prioritized building in effective and creative community engagement strategies to ensure community representation while developing collaborative partnerships to drive meaningful, collective impact in community health improvement.
Prior to her consulting experience, Melissa worked in both non-profit and for-profit healthcare settings, including hospitals, outpatient facilities and managed care organizations. She has direct experience in population health management, having led hospital-based population health and community outreach initiatives, aligning efforts with clinical and operational priorities. She applies data-driven approaches to decision making, leveraging analyses to inform population health strategy.
Melissa has provided medical nutrition therapy and nutrition counseling as a registered dietitian and nutritionist. She maintains her license in multiple states and has extensive experience designing and implementing Food Is Medicine programs that expand nutrition access, support chronic disease prevention and management, and address health-related social needs.
Melissa has led nutrition operations at the clinical level, strengthening care coordination and service delivery and leveraged her nutrition expertise to integrate best practices into broader population and community health initiatives. Partnering with healthcare organizations, universities, local governments, community-based organizations, and private sector stakeholders, Melissa has developed and evaluated nutrition interventions, including nutrition education, produce prescription programs, farmers market voucher initiatives, and food box distribution programs. She specializes in translating evidence-based nutrition science into scalable, patient-centered strategies that improve health outcomes and advance health equity.
Melissa earned her bachelor’s degree in nutrition and dietetics from Florida International University. She is a registered dietitian and nutritionist, certified by the Commission on Dietetic Registration.