Ms. McKeel has over 24 years of communications and marketing experience in the healthcare industry. She is responsible for coordinating and/or developing many of the products (e.g., Web sites, web-based tools, publications, newsletters, community, patient, and scientific articles, etc.) required by the Duke Clinical Research Institute, as well as Duke’s CTSA, the Duke Translational Medicine Institute (DTMI).

Prior to joining Duke, McKeel worked as a senior technical writer, creating training materials and user guides for hospital information systems developed by Burroughs Corporation in Charlotte, NC. She later joined a health insurance software developer in Columbia, SC, leading software system development analysis and writing efforts for international health insurance software implementation projects.

McKeel joined the information systems department at Duke University Medical Center in 1989. She was responsible for developing training courses and materials for hospital and clinic software systems, leading business writing and presentation skills courses for staff, and training clinical staff to use a variety of new PC-based applications. As an active member on many application software development teams, she helped create and deploy new patient care clinical systems in the hospital and outpatient clinics.

In 1996, McKeel developed an award-winning international medical data informatics standards Web site, in partnership with the Regenstrief Institute, with grant support from The John A. Hartford Foundation, Inc. In 1999, she coordinated and launched the first health system-wide intranet for Duke University Health System (for over 6000 employees) using an internally developed content management system. One year later, she supervised the design, development, and deployment of the first version of the Duke University Health System public Web site, Dukehealth.org.

McKeel is also a web design consultant and freelance writer for a variety of civic, community, and non-profit organizations, including the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), for whom she developed the initial Web site content and design for the Biomedical Research Integrated Domain Group (BRIDG) Model.