Lisa Rickey | Master of Science in Healthcare Quality and Safety

As a Pediatric Hospitalist at Boston Children’s Hospital, Lisa Rickey, MD, MHQS, has dedicated her career to improving the safety and quality of pediatric care. But her path toward becoming a leader in health care quality and safety began long before she stepped into her current role.

After growing up in Rhode Island, Rickey spent several years working at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston before pursuing medical school. Her interest in patient safety emerged during her medical school training. She vividly remembers caring for a sick patient, watching her team navigate critical decisions, and receiving feedback about what they might have done differently. “I wondered how people knew when to pull the trigger on treatments—and why,” she recalls. “That was the moment I started thinking about safety at the system level.”

Guided by exceptional mentors, Rickey began to see how teams and organizations approach quality and safety and how systems can both support and hinder patient care. That early exposure shaped her Hospitalist fellowship, and by 2020—amid the COVID-19 pandemic—she interviewed for opportunities that would deepen this interest.

One mentor urged her to consider the Master of Science in Healthcare Quality and Safety at Harvard Medical School. As soon as she enrolled, Rickey knew it was the right fit. “This program focused on all aspects of quality and safety, but not just in research—it’s about how systems, people, operations, and leadership work together,” she says.

Rickey found the coursework immensely practical and immediately applicable. “The value of this program is that it’s intended to train people who are not only doing the work, but also leading the teams,” she explains. The curriculum helped her understand how to position herself as a quality and safety leader, whether in a clinical department or across a health system. She also appreciated that the skills were directly transferrable to her daily practice.

Several courses proved impactful. Rickey reflected on the value of the ‘Quality and Systems’ course, which covered the fundamentals of improvement initiatives, including quality improvement fundamentals, change management strategies, and sustainability design. “It taught me the higher-order thinking behind this work—something I use every day,” she notes. Today, she co-directs this course as a faculty member.

Another standout course was the elective in quality and safety education, which informed her development and leadership of the quality and safety curriculum for Hospital Medicine fellows at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is also spearheading institution-wide efforts to strengthen graduate medical education training in quality and safety. “That course gave me the skills to contribute in a much broader way,” she says.

Rickey also looks back fondly on her capstone experience, describing it as transformative. She worked closely with Brittany Esty, MD, MPH, an associate program director for MHQS and a colleague at Boston Children’s Hospital. “This class is so well designed that you can take what you learn in the classroom and apply it in real life,” Rickey says. “It’s like having a little guardian angel on your shoulder to make sure you’re going in the right direction.”

Her capstone project addressed a critical gap in pediatric care: the process for transitioning children who require nasogastric tubes for feeding support from the hospital to their homes. Despite how frequently this transition occurs, there was no established workflow or protocol. Without a standard process, hospitals risk variation in care, rushed discharges, missteps, and safety vulnerabilities for families at home. When a colleague mentioned how often this issue caused frustration, Rickey immediately saw an opportunity to improve the system.

Collaborating with teams across the hospital, she helped standardize procedures for ordering home medical equipment and created a clear protocol for clinicians to follow. The results were meaningful—reduced variability in care, improvements in length of stay, and better preparation for families transitioning home. It also led to cost savings by streamlining discharge processes and avoiding hospital discharge delays for families. The new process has been adapted and scaled across the organization.

Rickey completed the virtual program during her hospitalist fellowship, taking classes part-time. Balancing coursework with clinical responsibilities required careful time management, but she found the application-based assignments aligned with her work. She was impressed by the faculty’s ability to deliver high-quality instruction and foster connection across diverse student backgrounds. “You get to hear about people’s work in other countries, which can be very different from the way we practice in the U.S.,” she says.

Throughout the program, Rickey continued to lean on her faculty directors and capstone advisors for career guidance, personal support, and leadership development. The experience strengthened not only her skill set but also her professional network. Several colleagues at Boston Children’s Hospital were also alumni of the program, which became a catalyst for building deeper relationships across the institution. Beyond Boston, she continues to stay in touch with graduates across regions and countries.

For Rickey, the impact of the program was immediate. She graduated in May 2023 and stepped into her first faculty role soon afterward. By November, the position of Director of Patient Safety and Quality for Hospital Medicine opened at her hospital. She served as Interim Director before officially taking on the role. “The program set me up for success at that early stage in my career,” she says. “My career trajectory was markedly changed because of what I learned.”

Recently, she received the inaugural Boston Children’s Hospital Department of Pediatrics Quality Improvement Early Achievement Award for 2025 in recognition of her leadership and impact in the field. When asked what advice she would give prospective students, Rickey doesn’t hesitate: “Just do it. This program covers the fundamentals all the way to higher-order work, giving you the benefit of learning from others who share similar roles and passions,” she says.

Written by Lauren Young