Stephanie Mercado, CAE, CPHQ, is the chief executive officer/executive director of the National Association for Healthcare Quality® (NAHQ), the leader in industry-standard healthcare quality and safety competencies, training, and certification in healthcare quality for individuals working in healthcare quality. Under Mercado’s leadership, NAHQ has expanded its footprint to support healthcare organizations develop capabilities and systematically build capacity for quality, leading to a more engaged and effective workforce.
Mercado brings more than 20 years of healthcare industry experience to her role. Since joining NAHQ in 2013, Mercado has been focused on understanding unmet needs to advance quality and safety and building solutions to solve these known and unknown challenges. She commissioned innovations and introduced methodologies to research and define standardized competencies and develop never-before-available data and insights to drive workforce development. Getting arms around the challenge and creating a vision for the future has resulted in advancement of quality professionals and increased visibility and credibility of healthcare’s quality workforce.
A highly sought-after speaker and author on healthcare quality workforce development and system sustainability, Mercado speaks nationally about strategies to drive healthcare quality and improve healthcare outcomes via the biggest lever healthcare has to affect change, the workforce.
