Director of Patient Safety at Billings Clinic in Billings, Montana

Job Description:

The Director of Patient Safety serves as a subject matter expert regarding patient safety science, patient safety systems, fair and just accountability, and high reliability organizing. The position is responsible for providing strategic and operational leadership for all aspects of the Billings Clinic Patient Safety Program, with the goal of providing the highest quality and safest care to patients while decreasing risk to the organization. The position will collaborate with the Executive Director of Transformation, Chief Quality Officer (CQO), and senior executives in leading the cultural transformation of Billings Clinic to ensure the delivery of safe, highly reliable care, and exceptional patient experience and reaching zero preventable harm.


The position will drive system-wide efforts to continuously improve the safety, reliability, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, and timeliness of health care service to all patients. The position will be responsible for the development of an integrated approach to patient safety across the organization, ensuring high reliability, process improvement, and shared responsibility. The position will facilitate and lead achieving outstanding performance on key nationally standardized metrics of patient safety while playing a key role in developing a comprehensive program and systems to minimize patient harm by creating a culture of safety; proactively identifying risk; and encouraging adverse event reporting and thoughtful, learning-oriented analysis of safety events and near misses. The position will serve as a key liaison to all healthcare services, nursing, clinical, and administrative departments, medical staff organization, and committees throughout Billings Clinic and all fully-owned branch locations.


The position will have the ability to step into a high-functioning department and lead the team and patient safety system activities aimed at reaching the goal of zero preventable harm.


This position, together with the Executive Director of Transformation and CQO, is responsible for leading, planning and implementing the strategic initiatives, education and training needed to meet the annual goals.


Essential Job Functions


• Leads and supports patient safety activities and practices, utilizing the knowledge of the science of patient safety, high reliability organizing, process improvement principles, and quality standards for improved patient care and services.
• Collaborates with the medical staff, nursing, quality, pharmacy, risk management, and other
• relevant interdisciplinary teams to coordinate patient safety activities, event investigations and reporting to appropriate Billings Clinic committees and senior executive leadership.
• Develops and implements systems and methodologies to achieve strategic goals for patient safety management and quality improvement.
• Educates and assists medical, nursing, residents, other clinical staff, senior executive leadership, and management in identifying and capitalizing upon opportunities for quality improvement and facilitates cross-functional team development, when appropriate.
• Standardizes processes to optimize learning from patient safety occurrence reporting. Performs analysis and analytics to support trend identification
• Develops and implements annual training and provides education in patient safety science, process improvement and high reliability principles
• Serves as a neutral facilitator for patient safety culture surveys and assists teams and leaders with development of improvement plans for identified opportunities
• Oversees recognition programs to acknowledge safety performance. Participates in the planning, nomination, and selection of the annual Great Catch Award program. Recognizes individuals and teams of near miss events and use of HRO Universal Skills.
• Serves as a subject matter expert in High Reliability Organizing (HRO) principles, Leadership Methods, and Universal Skills. Utilizes universal skills in daily work and serves as a resource and champion for the application of HRO skills.
• Supports and models behaviors consistent with Billings Clinic's mission, vision, values, code of business conduct and service expectations. Meets all mandatory organizational and departmental requirements. Maintains competency in all organizational, departmental, and outside agency standards as it relates to the environment, employee, patient safety or job performance
• Performs all other duties as assigned or as needed to meet the needs of the department and organization