Patient Safety and Systems Improvement Specialist II

Schuylkill•Allentown, PA

13d•Onsite

About The Position

The Patient Safety and Systems Improvement Specialist advances the safety of healthcare delivery and clinical operations by strengthening system robustness and resilience. The role applies safety science principles—including Human Factors Engineering, systems engineering, and resilience engineering—to examine how people, technology, tasks, workflows, environments, and organizational conditions interact and affect processes, patient outcomes, and operational performance. Working with clinical, operational, and executive leadership, the specialist evaluates work systems and safety events to identify hazards and systemic vulnerabilities and mitigate clinical risk. The role uses reactive and proactive risk assessments to inform system redesign across the care continuum. It also applies human-centered design, qualitative research, simulation, and cognitive load assessment to understand frontline work and assess and validate system improvements. This is an onsite, day-shift position at Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest, scheduled Monday through Friday from 0800 to 1630.

Requirements

Associate degree in a clinical discipline, such as Nursing, Advanced Practice, Respiratory Therapy, Dietary/Nutrition, or Physical/Occupational Therapy.
One year of prior clinical experience in an applicable discipline, with demonstrated exposure to patient safety, quality, or process improvement work.
Three years of relevant clinical and/or safety-related experience.
Obtain the CPPS (Certified Professional in Patient Safety) credential within two years.
Ability to lift and carry 25 lbs.
Frequent sitting and standing, and frequent keyboard use.

Responsibilities

Evaluate patient safety events and near-misses using structured methodologies such as ACA/RCA2/RCA3, Common Cause Analysis, cognitive interviewing, and event re-enactments to identify contributing factors, hazards, and system vulnerabilities.
Conduct proactive and prospective risk assessments, including Failure Mode and Effects Analysis/FMECA, Prospective Risk Assessment, and Success Cause Analysis, to identify latent risks and hazards before harm occurs.
Lead and facilitate multidisciplinary improvement initiatives using methods such as Kaizen events, value stream mapping, workout sessions, and agile methodology to redesign processes and reduce preventable harm.
Apply resilience engineering principles to assess organizational adaptive capacity and learn how frontline teams manage complexity, then design systems that better anticipate, monitor, respond to, and learn from emerging risks.
Coach and mentor staff and safety team members on patient safety science and improvement methodologies, and communicate findings and progress to stakeholders throughout the organization.
Partner with clinical, operational, and executive leadership to prioritize risks and translate findings into actionable, sustainable action items; ensure interventions address contributing factors, have clear ownership, and are tracked for effectiveness in alignment with NPSG, TJC, and CMS standards.
Apply Human Factors Engineering and human-centered design principles, including cognitive ergonomics, card sorting, ethnography, and journey mapping, to evaluate and redesign clinical workflows, technologies, and environments.
Conduct contextual inquiry and direct field observation to understand how frontline work is performed and capture the gap between work-as-imagined and work-as-done to inform system redesign.
Analyze work systems using qualitative research techniques, including focused group analysis, contextual inquiry, and journey mapping; map system complexity through SEIPS-based interaction analyses of people, tools, tasks, environments, and organizational conditions.
Facilitate simulation-based testing, including in situ simulation, tabletop exercises, heuristic evaluations, Monte Carlo simulation, and card sorting, and conduct cognitive load assessments such as NASA-TLX and SUS to identify usability issues and validate proposed interventions before implementation.