Heather’s path through healthcare has given her a broad view of what safety means in practice.
As a Nurse Practitioner in surgery, Heather saw how much patients and families rely on healthcare teams. Those interactions, she says, can shape the way people experience healthcare, for better or worse.
Gaining insight into healthcare from another angle, she joined a large hospital in 2021 to work in their patient safety department, conducting Root Cause Analysis and strategic planning about workplace violence prevention. Building on this experience, she move to a substance use treatment center as a Risk Manager handling areas such as emergency preparedness and patient safety events, gaining insight into healthcare from another angle.
Two perspectives blended together and led her to RLDatix:
- an understanding of the immediacy of frontline care, where providers are making decisions, supporting patients, and navigating complex situations in real time; and
- an understanding of the systems that underpin safety: how incident management teams assess risks, how events are reported, and how organizations prepare for emergencies.
After transitioning to a Patient Safety Organization, she started working with the data mapping process. Here, she noted how atomization for protections could make it easier for healthcare organizations and wanted to help reduce this burden. That's when she wanted to join RLDatix.
With this decision, she would be helping healthcare organizations on a broader scale.
Today, as Patient Safety Manager, Safety Institute, Heather brings what she calls a “dual lensed approach” to her work. Her experience in both bedside care and patient safety/risk helps her look at potential process improvements from two important perspectives.
Behind every event, report, process, or metric are healthcare teams working to protect their patients.
That's the reality behind the workflow.
Knowing both sides, Heather's dual lens shapes the way she guides customers when thinking about their patient safety programs and interpretation of their data.
For Heather, the work feels meaningful because it helps customers "maintain their culture of safety and get ahead of organizational risks." Her role also includes working directly with a variety of internal teams where she can inform updates to our solutions so they continue to reflect customers needs.
Heather’s work today may look different from her time in surgery, but her passion remains consistent bringing everything she has learned from healthcare into every customer interaction and every opportunity to help organizations deliver safer care.
Stay tuned for more stories from our team members!
