An engineer by education, Jeff Norton has been applying high-reliability manufacturing and lean principles in healthcare with great success for twenty years. 

Norton’s career has spanned more than thirty years with significant, increasing responsibility and impact. He began as a consultant for Accenture and later became a manufacturing plant manager for the Fortune 500 Company Timken, an automotive supplier. Seeing the need in health care for high reliability/lean/TPS techniques, Norton pioneered a new role in health care and became a national quality and safety director for Catholic Health Initiatives. When an opportunity arose to apply lean principles in health care and work directly with executives from Toyota, he moved to UK HealthCare as the director of the quality and safety program. Since that time he has held the role of Chief Performance Officer at UC Health (University of Cincinnati) and most recently as the Vice President for Safety Quality and Clinical Performance Improvement at TriHealth in Cincinnati. Norton co-created the AAPL Science of High Reliability course more than a decade ago and has enjoyed seeing the topic gain interest and produce great results.

Norton has hands-on experience leading quality and safety in academic medical centers and community hospitals. His style is tactical and practical and aimed at getting significant and measurable results. Norton’s work has been recognized and published by organizations including the Health Care Advisory Board, the Joint Commission, Institute for Health Care Improvement (IHI), and America’s Essential Hospitals.