Headway Principal, Safety and Risk Management at Headway to own safety and clinical risk management for behavioral health provider network. Manage safety event intake, triage, investigation, and reporting.
Responsibilities
We're seeking a Principal, Safety and Risk Management to join Headway's Clinical Strategy team and own safety and clinical risk management for our nationwide behavioral health provider network. Behavioral health carries a specific risk profile, including suicide and self-harm risk, violence in the community, medication and controlled substance safety, telehealth crisis management, and handoffs to emergency or higher levels of care. Headway is building the infrastructure to capture and learn from these events. This role is the senior owner who turns that infrastructure into a functioning safety and risk program, and turns what it surfaces into changes in how care is delivered.
This is an ideal role for a patient safety and clinical risk leader with a behavioral health background who has built a patient safety program, whether in a health system or a technology based health environment, and who wants to define a national safety function while it is still being shaped.
Own the operating system for reported safety events end to end, including intake and triage through investigation, systematic event analysis, corrective action, and case closure. Build the reporting culture that surfaces events in the first place.
Partner with the clinical safety team to lead the investigation process in the review of serious events, root cause and apparent cause analyses, defining the investigation standards and reference taxonomy the program uses at scale.
Convert findings into corrective and preventive actions with named owners and due dates, track every action to verified closure across teams you do not manage, and translate event trends into upstream fixes that prevent future harm.
Serve as the trusted responder for high-risk clinical events needing immediate attention (e.g., an impaired provider actively seeing patients, adverse patient behavior), providing timely, compassionate, evidence-informed guidance and support to providers and internal teams to ensure proper resolution.
Build the protocol and policy layer. Draft and maintain patient safety and event management protocols and policy in partnership with Clinical Operations, Legal, and Compliance, so practice is consistent, scalable, and aligned with regulatory and ethical standards.
Own measurement and the Clinical Risk Dashboard. Define metrics and the baseline safety event rate, and analyze trends in reported events and contributing factors.
Report to Leadership and the Board. Produce the metrics, trend analysis, and case narrative for the quarterly Quality and Patient Safety Report, and support the Patient Safety Review Committee and peer-led governance committees. Structure investigations to meet regulatory requirements, accreditation standards, and delegated credentialing expectations, and supply the evidence of clinical oversight that payer and accreditation reviews require.
Build and execute detailed project plans with clinical leadership on new and novel patient safety programs as they arise.
You’d Be a Great Fit If You Have
Active clinical license as a master’s level therapist (LCSW, LPC, LMFT), doctorate clinical psychologist (PhD/PsyD), psychiatric clinician (PMHNP-BC, MD/DO), or nurse (RN), with 7+ years of experience in healthcare patient safety or clinical risk management, including direct ownership of event investigation and corrective action
Qualification
Required
You are comfortable being the first person in a role, in a program that is growing, and adaptable with new technology
Certification in Quality and Patient Safety, Healthcare Quality and Management, Healthcare Risk Management, or an equivalent patient safety credential — strongly preferred
