Clinical Risk Manager

About the Role

We’re seeking a Clinical Risk Manager to join Headway’s Clinical Strategy team and run the clinical risk program for our nationwide behavioral health provider network. Behavioral health carries a specific risk profile, including suicide and self-harm risks, medication and controlled substance safety, telehealth crisis management, and handoffs to emergency or higher levels of care. Headway has built the infrastructure to capture and learn from these events, and to continuously improve our systems of care. In this role, you will own reported safety events end to end, from intake and triage through investigation, systematic event analysis, corrective action, and verified closure, and you will translate learning from those events into systems improvements and leadership reporting. You will present and review findings with our internal governance and peer-led committees. This role additionally is responsible for studying and amplifying our culture of safety.

Reporting to the Senior Medical Director for Quality, Patient Safety, and Clinical Governance, you’ll also collaborate cross-functionally with clinical operations, legal, compliance, product, and data teams. This is an ideal role for a risk management professional with direct experience investigating and managing adverse events, who has a behavioral healthcare background. The ideal candidate will have experience working in a high-acuity, fast-paced environment, whether in a health system or a digital-health startup, and will have a demonstrated record of building and scaling national programs.

You will:

• Own the Safety Event Front Door: Run intake, triage, and case management for reported safety events, holding response timeframes and case status discipline through to closure, and building the reporting culture that surfaces events in the first place.

• Lead Investigations: Conduct reviews of serious events, code contributing factors, and code harm severity and care attribution to reference taxonomy, escalating to and working closely with Headway’s clinical leadership when necessary.

• Drive Corrective Action to Closure, and Learnings to Systems Improvement: Convert findings into corrective and preventive actions with named owners and due dates, and track every action to verified closure. Extract learning from events and trends, and translate these into system improvements to prevent future harm.

• Own the Clinical Risk Dashboard: Use data to drive risk analysis and mitigation efforts, maintain the reference taxonomy and the crosswalks that make separate reporting pathways comparable, 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.

• Build the Policy and Training Layer: Draft and maintain safety policies and event management protocols, run debriefs and lessons-learned communication, and champion a just culture approach so clinicians report without fear of blame.

• Support Regulatory and Accreditation responsibilities: Structure internal investigations to meet regulatory requirements, accreditation and delegated credentialing standards; regularly partner with Legal and Compliance when needed.

How Success Will Be Measured:

• Timely and Complete Event Management: Measured by response and resolution times against defined standards, case documentation completeness, and prioritized high-severity reviews.

• Corrective Action Closure: Measured by closure rates and overdue items in the corrective action register.

• Reliable Reporting: Measured by quarterly Quality and Patient Safety Reports delivered on schedule to clinical leadership and the board, against a published baseline event rate and agreed denominators.

• Reporting Culture: Measured by growth in voluntary reporting against baseline, and by provider and staff confidence that reporting leads to change.

• Systems Learning: Measured by findings translated into upstream fixes, and by reductions in repeat events of the same type.

You’d Be a Great Fit If:

• You have 5+ years experience in healthcare risk management or patient safety

• You have experience in behavioral health settings, whether outpatient, telehealth, crisis or inpatient

• You have owned event investigation and corrective action directly, and you work from established method and standard work at high case volume

• You triage and escalate soundly, and you know a clinical question from an operational or legal one, routing rather than deciding when it is not yours

• You are fluent with data. You can define a denominator, read a dashboard critically, and develop plans for deeper analysis

• You drive corrective actions to verified closure across teams you do not manage, including teams that do not yet know how to mitigate the risk in front of them

• You build reporting culture through relationships and just culture, and you can present findings to senior clinical and business leaders who will question them

• You have a deep commitment to ethical, patient-centered care

• You have a track record of developing high-impact and high-volume safety programs; you are comfortable being the first person in a role, in a program that is growing

Preferred but Not Required:

• Strongly preferred: CPHRM (Certified Professional in Healthcare Risk Management), CPPS, or an equivalent patient safety credential

• Actively licensed clinician (RN, LCSW, LPC, licensed psychologist, or an equivalent clinical credential)

• Accreditation or delegated credentialing survey experience