Behind her back, Jennifer DeCubellis gets called a rock star.

Recently, she was promoted to Hennepin County assistant administrator for health. DeCubellis is best known as the architect of and force behind Hennepin Health, the 18-month-old nationally known effort to integrate medical and behavioral health care with social services for Medicaid patients. The state gave the county control of its Medicaid money to create an HMO-like system for adults from 21-64 with no dependents and income at or below 75 percent of the federal poverty line.

Many of these patients have multiple, chronic physical and mental health problems. Preliminary indications are the program is working for some 6,000 enrollees and costs are going down. "Hennepin Health has taught us so much but it's been focused on this 1 percent of the population and this gives us the opportunity to make the focus bigger," she said of her new job.

DeCubellis got her start as a special-education teacher in a classroom with kids ages 8 to 21 who had been expelled from Chicago public schools. She quickly had them behaving and reading, but school administrators weren't pleased with her approach, so she went to graduate school for psychiatry.

The chronically mentally ill and public sector work are her passions. "Our systems are so complex that the very people we're trying to help can't navigate them," she said.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Minnetonka High School, DeCubellis now oversees the Public Health Department, the medical examiner's office, NorthPoint Health and Wellness and Metropolitan Health Plan.

In her first week in the new job, she made a discovery in the pharmacy: Rules don't allow the county to help psychiatric patients make co-payments on their drugs. "When you don't give somebody their $80 medicine, they end up in Anoka State Hospital at $900 a day. I would rather pay the $80," she said.

County Board Chairman Mike Opat said, "She is the real deal in terms of making things happen."

Rochelle Olson • 612-673-1747 @rochelleolson