Executive Director Quality

Providence•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Calling all Esteemed Leaders! Are you a quality leader who excels at advancing patient safety, clinical outcomes, and high-reliability performance across complex healthcare systems? Do you thrive in environments where data, regulatory excellence, and interdisciplinary collaboration drive measurable improvements in care? This leadership opportunity invites your expertise. The Role: The Executive Director of Quality provides vision and leadership throughout the Central Puget Sound Service Area (Legacy Swedish) for continuous improvement of clinical and service quality outcomes; designs, implements and maintains systems ensuring integration of quality support across the Service Area leading to improved health outcomes; integrates and promotes patient safety in partnership with Clinical, Risk, and Accreditation leaders. The Executive Director implements and maintains Central Puget Sound needed infrastructure to support, maintain, and achieve overall Quality Improvement best practice standards and compliance in alignment with governing Providence – Swedish Health System standards. Essential to the position's effectiveness will be to institutionalize best practice from national, state, system, and division. Promoting and standardizing clinical metrics, data integrity, statistical analysis, and evidenced based practice to mitigate patient harm and improve quality. The position oversees collecting, abstraction and reporting of data for internal and public reporting initiatives and optimizing organizational performance. Further, this role will be responsible for directing the ongoing culture of patient safety and risk management program through high reliability organizational principles. The Executive Director of Quality will operationalize processes to support compliance with regulations and standards and promote regulatory readiness. The Executive Director of Quality will support interdisciplinary teams of leadership, clinicians, caregivers, patients, consumers, and families to generate and transform patient experiences, and support service recovery. The Executive Director of Quality will work in collaboration with organizational leaders to translate specific strategic objectives into system and regional level interventions focused and deployed to achieve organizational goals. The Executive Director of Quality will be able to succeed in a highly matrixed organization and be able to create strategic alignment.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in BSN from an accredited school of Nursing preferred
Master's Degree in Nursing, Business, or Health Administration preferred
Washington Registered Nurse License (Vendor Managed) preferred upon hire
Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) preferred upon hire
5 or more years of experience in healthcare quality, patient safety, accreditation, risk management, with at least 3 years in a senior leadership/management role.
3 years Clinical care experience in a hospital refers to the hands-on, patient-focused work performed by healthcare professionals in inpatient settings. This experience involves direct patient assessment, treatment delivery, monitoring, and coordination of care within a hospital environment.
Experience with system and process redesign, human factors engineering, and the various process improvement methodologies and related activities of quality/safety improvement and risk management (preferred)
Knowledge of disease pathophysiology and drug utilization.
Literacy PC/Systems, including the Internet and Microsoft office skills.
Effective written and verbal communication skills, including report writing and oral presentation skills.
Capacity to work independently in a virtual office setting, or in a facility setting if required to travel for assignment.
Ability to integrate ethical standards into professional practice that support healthcare quality and safety.
Ability to assess, coach, train and develop talent.
Use change management principles and tools for improvement projects and initiatives and manage changes while minimizing interruption at an operational and service level.
Implements standard performance and process improvement (PPI) methods into individual, team and project work activities.

Responsibilities

Provide leadership, strategic direction and support for clinical quality and safety in the Central Puget Sound (CPS) Service Area through quality improvement, patient safety, and transformative care initiatives.
Coordinates with operational leaders to develop, implement and monitor systems of care, create a safe culture and to improve patient outcomes and decrease overall cost of care.
Champions a data-driven environment for clinical quality, patient safety, infection prevention and regulatory compliance across the system.
Generates and analyzes reports to identify opportunities for continuous improvement by ministries; provides feedback, develops and implements action plans when appropriate.
Partner with leaders and caregivers to improve Culture of Safety with a focus on harm prevention and a reduction in adverse events.
Support, evaluate, and promote alignment of quality and safety program goals with organizational financial goals.
Provides oversight and completes interviews, hiring, training, and evaluates all quality caregivers; counsels caregivers regarding employment and performance management in accordance with Human Resources policies; ensures competency of all staff by conducting on-going regular reviews and skills assessments and provides action plans and timely, providing constructive feedback as needed.
Develops and monitors implementation of ministry specific goals/objectives and performance improvement processes in alignment with Providence Swedish North Division and Providence Health System.
Develops and maintains budget requirements and ensures compliance.
In partnership with risk management leadership establish and maintain communications, process and practice to mitigate and communicate risk.
In partnership with regulatory readiness leadership leads the organization through survey processes, findings, and plan of corrections.
Supports the Central Puget Sound Quality structure and related activities: Coordinates initiatives and Quality Strategic Plans established by System, Divisional, Central Puget Sound leadership, and others as appropriate; Maintains the Quality Assurance Performance Improvement Plans (QAPI) for Central Puget Sound, in alignment Division and System goals.
Develops, implements, and optimizes the use of standardized national metrics aligned with groups including but not limited to National Quality Strategy, National Quality Forum, National Safety Institute, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, ECRI Institute, Institute for Healthcare Improvement and others.
Maintains awareness of industry changes and serves as a resource for sharing national best practice models.
Promoting innovation.
Facilitate adoption of evidence-based best practices that advance and strengthen the organization.
Assists in the design/development of standardized reports/scorecards relative to clinical care, service line analysis, harm reduction, comparative data and statistical analysis including but not limited to statistical process control charts, lean six sigma methodologies.
Develop educational programs and tracking systems to maintain gains made with clinical care improvement, Value Based programs to include Medicare or payers’ programs such as harm reduction, readmission reduction, cost reduction, mortality reduction and other national quality strategies.
Using quality and high reliability organization fundamental principles the Executive Director of Quality supports health care transformation, including the utilization of diverse quality measures, the development of a comprehensive, Quality Assurance and Practice Improvement plan, and the implementation of a learning health system.
Supporting a focus on structural, process, outcome, and patient experience measures, as well as staff engagement and real-time data monitoring, the Executive Director of Quality promotes, evaluates, and sustains a culture of safety and achieves high-reliability performance.