Heidi Wald, MD, MSPH

Senior Advisor and Chief Quality Officer, Practicing Excellence

2009 Fellow

Dr. Wald is Senior Advisor and Chief Quality Officer at Practicing Excellence, a human development company that helps healthcare organizations, teams, and individuals build skills to drive outcomes.

Previously, Dr. Wald was named the Chief Quality and Safety Officer at Intermountain Health in August 2022, having served in the same role at SCL Health since January 2019. She was responsible for supporting the operational quality and safety work across three markets, including 33 hospitals and greater than 400 ambulatory sites in an enterprise-wide, clinical shared services approach.

At SCL Health, Dr. Wald directed the operational quality and safety teams and clinical performance improvement efforts.  Special projects included a Just Culture operational implementation and COVID Medical Branch leadership. Dr. Wald has a longstanding interest in early mobility for hospitalized patients. While Chair of the Quality Committee for the American Geriatrics Society, she led and co-authored a seminal White Paper on Mobility Measurement in Hospitalized Older Patients. At SCL Health, she promoted early mobility across all acute care units.

Prior to joining SCL Health, Dr. Wald was an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Health Care Policy Research at the University of Colorado (CU) School of Medicine where she was a faculty member between 2007 and 2018. She has authored over 60 peer reviewed articles on patient safety and quality of care for the older adult population in hospitals and nursing homes. She served as the Department of Medicine’s Vice Chair for Quality from 2011-2016.

Dr. Wald is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She completed a fellowship in Geriatric Medicine, an NRSA Primary Care Research Fellowship, and an MSPH at the University of Colorado Denver. Dr. Wald was a 2009 Atlantic Philanthropies Health and Aging Policy Fellow. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and Geriatric Medicine.

Areas of Interest

Program Info

Program Track
Non-Residential

Placement
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ); and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)