Katherine Santos, MBA is the Vice President of Strategy and Operational Excellence at Legacy Lifecare (LL), a leading and innovative organization that provides high quality and compassionate post-acute and residential care in Massachusetts. She oversees the organizational strategies for advancing clinical and operational excellence at LL. A key focus is leading and facilitating efforts that enhance and expand a culture of service excellence and continuous improvement. Working with senior leadership, Santos supports the formation, facilitation, tracking, communication and achievement of annual strategic goals.
Throughout her career, Santos has established herself as a leading expert in healthcare quality and performance improvement. Prior to joining LL in 2019, she spent seventeen years working in this field at Brigham Health, most recently as the Director of Service Excellence and Performance Improvement at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital. Santos is also on the leadership board of the Massachusetts Healthcare Lean Network, a grassroots organization with over 400 members and 100 healthcare organizations across Massachusetts and New England that promotes learning within the healthcare quality and process improvement field.
Santos is also passionate about sharing her experiences and teaching healthcare leaders how to lead quality improvement in their own organizations. She is a highly trained and experienced instructor of Lean, Kaizen, Work-Out and Change Acceleration Process by GE Healthcare Performance Solutions. Katherine also holds several teaching positions in the Post Graduate Medical Education Department at Harvard Medical School, frequently serving as faculty in both the master and certificate programs attended by healthcare leaders across the globe. She is currently the associate program director of the Master of Healthcare Quality and Safety, the lead program director of the Safety, Quality, Informatics, and Leadership program and the capstone director of the Leadership in Medicine: Southeast Asia program.
Santos earned her Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Harvard. She also holds a Master of Business Administration, with a concentration on Business Analytics, from MIT Sloan School of Management
