Speaker
Helen Macfie, PharmD, FABC, IHI Fellow
Helen Macfie, PharmD, is currently executive in residence for MemorialCare, a four-hospital, 1,350 bed nonprofit health system including a Medical Foundation and more than 2,600 affiliated physicians, located in Southern California. Dr. Macfie recently “retired” from the role of chief transformation officer for MemorialCare and is currently serving as the acting COO for MemorialCare’s Long Beach Medical Center and Miller Children’s and Women’s Hospital. There, she is promoting their focus on operational, clinical and leadership excellence. Dr. Macfie has 18 years of experience leading health system-level transformation and performance improvement for MemorialCare’s clinical quality, patient safety, risk management, utilization, Lean, and patient and family experience initiatives. Additional areas of responsibility have included coordination of systemwide strategic planning activities, oversight of MemorialCare’s Clinically Integrated Network’s initiative development and deployment, systemwide operational Value-Added Teams, executive sponsorship of the system’s Physician Society Board and clinical Best Practice Teams, and serving as the health system’s Incident Commander for COVID response from 2020 to 2022. Dr. Macfie has been named as one of the Top 50 Patient Safety Experts Leading the Field and Top Transformation Officers by Becker’s Hospital Review. She has served on numerous boards and advisory panels for quality and safety and is currently a member of the Board of Directors for California Healthcare Compare. She is a voluntary faculty member for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and, for the past eight years, has been serving as an active contributor to the IHI’s Leadership Alliance. Dr. Macfie earned her Doctor of Pharmacy degree at UCSF School of Pharmacy, San Francisco, followed by post-graduate residencies in clinical pharmacy at UCSD and in pharmacy administration at Long Beach Medical Center. Her Fellow of the Advisory Board Company was earned for completing a two-year fellowship in Leadership of the Healthcare Enterprise for the 21st Century and she recently earned her IHI Fellowship certification in 2022. She practiced as an acute care pharmacist for 13 years prior to moving into her organizational improvement work spanning more than 25 years.