Chief Quality Officer

The Chief Quality Officer is a member of the UConn Health Waterbury senior leadership team and has oversight and responsibility over all quality and patient safety-related activities within the hospital and the medical group. The CQO directs the efforts of all performance improvement initiatives to ensure overall compliance with regulatory standards, including national, state, CMS, DPH and other agencies. The Chief Quality Officer will serve in a highly visible leadership role, working collaboratively across the enterprise with clinicians, staff, and administrators to improve overall patient safety and systems-level outcomes.

The CQO will provide leadership in developing and implementing a strategy for change management and for strengthening a culture of safety throughout the organization.

• Collaboratively set the vision and strategy for clinical excellence and ensure that the operational and clinical systems, resources, and processes are in place to meet clinical quality and patient safety goals.
• Lead the Quality and Safety programs at UCHC Waterbury, including the Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement (QAPI) program.
• Promote, implement, and sustain a Culture of Safety.
• Ensure that UConn Health is a learning organization by applying new methodologies to eliminate waste and empower decision‑making at the front lines of the organization.
• Complete Medical Staff quality interventions as needed.
• Drives external reputational management including Leapfrog, CMS Stars, Vizient, public reporting strategy and reputational sensitive quality improvement efforts and communication of same.

• Focus on improving healthcare value and quality, including the improvement of clinical outcomes, patient experience, patient safety, costs, revenue, productivity, efficiency, employee and physician satisfaction, and process reliability.
• Develop and utilize organizational dashboards to track Quality & Safety performance.
• Serve as executive sponsor for reporting activities to external quality pay‑for‑performance data submission and share responsibility with Chief Medical Officer to make final review of data and responses prior to submission.
• Responsible for Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement (QAPI) reports and preparation for monthly QAPI Committee meetings, including maintaining the institutional quality and patient safety scorecard.
• Responsible for updating the annual Clinical Quality and Service Performance Improvement Plan.
• Participate in physician peer review processes and chart reviews, as necessary.
• Maintains physician quality scorecards on all employed and independent physicians on the medical staff working in the hospital.
• Ensure FPPE/OPPE, professional practice evaluations are completed timely and accurately.

• Lead or serve as executive sponsor for select Performance Improvement activities within UConn Health.
• Build collaborative partnerships with providers, staff, and leadership to produce measurable improvements in processes and practices that affect patient outcomes and the success of the UConn Health Waterbury initiatives.
• Leads Value Based Care including Pay for performance strategy, quality incentive alignment, risk‑based contracting support, population health quality integration.
• Facilitate alignment between improvement initiatives and UConn Health Waterbury’s strategic plan through the execution of the strategies and tactics necessary to successfully improve the outcomes and results of the organization.

• Proactively address patient safety issues utilizing data, identifying trends, rounding, and determining root causes and solutions.
• Serve as one of UConn Health’s Waterbury Patient Safety Officers.
• Review, investigate and analyze…