CEO
National Association for Healthcare Quality
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 for individuals working in healthcare quality. Under Mercado’s leadership, NAHQ has expanded its footprint to support healthcare organizations in developing capabilities and systematically building 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, she has focused on understanding unmet needs to advance quality and safety and building solutions to solve these 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. Confronting the challenges 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. In 2023, Modern Healthcare recognized Mercado as one of the Top 25 Women Leaders and was awarded the 2023 Samuel B. Shapiro Award for Chief Staff Executive Achievement by the Association Forum.
I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
8:15 AM – 9:30 AM East Coast USA Time