Manager - Patient Safety

📋 Description

• • Lead Nebraska Medicine’s enterprise-wide patient safety program, translating our promise of “Serious Medicine, Extraordinary Care” into measurable reductions in harm and risk. You will own the strategic roadmap for safety improvement, setting ambitious yet attainable targets that align with national benchmarks and regulatory expectations.
• • Direct a multidisciplinary team of safety specialists, data analysts, and clinical champions who investigate, trend, and respond to safety events ranging from near-misses to serious reportable incidents. You will coach these colleagues to conduct rigorous debriefs, root cause analyses (RCAs), and failure mode & effects analyses (FMEAs) that uncover system vulnerabilities and drive sustainable fixes.
• • Establish and continuously refine standardized workflows for event intake, triage, review, and closure. You will ensure every safety report is acknowledged within one business day, screened for severity within three days, and—when indicated—escalated to a full RCA within 30 days, all while maintaining transparency with patients, families, and frontline staff.
• • Translate complex safety data into compelling dashboards, scorecards, and storyboards that resonate with executives, board members, and bedside clinicians alike. You will present monthly to the Quality & Safety Committee, quarterly to the Board of Directors, and ad-hoc to unit councils, translating metrics into actionable insights that secure resources and sustain momentum.
• • Partner with Human Resources, Risk Management, and Legal to design and deploy a Just Culture framework that balances accountability with learning. You will personally coach managers on how to conduct non-punitive safety conversations and will track the effectiveness of these interventions through culture-of-safety surveys and staff engagement metrics.
• • Collaborate with Information Technology to optimize the electronic safety reporting system, integrating triggers from the EHR, bed management, and laboratory systems. You will champion the use of predictive analytics to identify high-risk scenarios before harm occurs, piloting machine-learning models that flag sepsis, pressure injuries, and medication errors in real time.
• • Build and maintain an external network of safety leaders across academic medical centers, state hospital associations, and national collaboratives such as IHI, AHRQ, and Vizient. You will leverage this network to benchmark our performance, import best practices, and position Nebraska Medicine as a regional leader in safety innovation.
• • Oversee the annual safety education curriculum for more than 8,000 colleagues, ensuring that onboarding, annual competencies, and just-in-time training reflect the latest evidence and regulatory requirements. You will personally facilitate leadership development sessions that empower directors and charge nurses to own safety at the unit level.
• • Manage a dedicated patient safety budget, allocating funds for training, technology, and improvement projects that deliver a minimum 3:1 return on investment. You will negotiate vendor contracts, oversee grant applications, and report quarterly on financial impact to the Chief Quality Officer.
• • Champion diversity, equity, and inclusion in every safety initiative, ensuring that improvement plans address known disparities in care outcomes. You will disaggregate safety data by race, ethnicity, language, and socioeconomic status, partnering with the Office of Health Equity to design interventions that close identified gaps.
• • Serve as the primary liaison with regulatory bodies (CMS, TJC, DNV) during surveys and complaint investigations. You will prepare evidence binders, lead mock tracers, and ensure that corrective action plans are submitted on time and fully implemented, maintaining Nebraska Medicine’s exemplary accreditation status.
• • Foster a psychologically safe environment where frontline staff feel empowered to speak up. You will round weekly on high-risk units, host open forums, and maintain a 24/7 safety hotline, personally responding to calls and modeling the transparency we expect from every colleague.