Darlene Bainbridge, MS

A nationally-recognized innovator in healthcare quality and risk management, Darlene Bainbridge has worked with hundreds of hospitals to improve their quality, survey outcomes and patient satisfaction scores, while disproving the notion that quality costs more than it saves. She has helped to reposition a number of clinically- and financially-distressed hospitals for survival and those facing survey-related shutdown. She is the Founder and President of Darlene D. Bainbridge Associates, Inc., one of the nation’s most forward-thinking organizations in health care quality and risk management.

Ms. Bainbridge developed and implemented Strategic Quality Support System (SQSS), an enterprise quality and risk management system that is recognized by those who use it as the reason they have been able to strengthen their reputations for quality while reducing their risk of medical errors, decreasing costs, maximizing operational efficiency and improving patient satisfaction.

She currently serves as the lead consultant for a State Rural Health project that works with thirty rural hospitals to help them strengthen their approaches to quality management to compete in an increasingly-hostile and costly healthcare environment. She also works with more than 150 healthcare facilities across the country to strengthen their quality programs and implement the kind of quality programs necessary to survive utilizing smart technology and electronic systematization—a necessity as they recognize that they have run out of the money and manpower for the resource-consumptive and manual ways of the past.

She has extensive experience as a hospital CEO and nursing home administrator and more than four decades of experience in improving hospital quality and risk management approaches with special attention on patient safety, risk reduction and satisfaction improvement.