Head of Clinical Quality and Regulatory

At LifeStance Health, we strive to help individuals, families, and communities with their mental health needs. Everywhere. Every day. It’s a lofty goal; we know. But we make it happen with the best team in mental healthcare.

Thank you for taking the time to explore a career with us. As the fastest growing mental health practice group in the country, now is the perfect time to join our team!

LifeStance Health Values

• Belonging: We cultivate a space where everyone can show up as their authentic self.

• Empathy: We seek out diverse perspectives and listen to learn without judgment.

• Courage: We are all accountable for doing the right thing - even when it's hard - because we know it's worth it.

• One Team: We realize our full potential when we work together towards our shared purpose.

Benefits
As a full-time employee of LifeStance Health, the following benefits are offered: medical, dental, vision, AD&D, short and long-term disability, and life insurance. Additional benefits include a 401k retirement savings with employer match, paid parental leave, paid time off, holiday pay and an Employee Assistance Program.

ROLE OVERVIEW

The Senior Director, Clinical Quality and Regulatory provides enterprise leadership for LifeStance’s clinical quality, safety, incident management, regulatory readiness, and accreditation infrastructure within the Chief Medical Office. This role sets the strategy, operating model, standards, governance cadence, and accountability mechanisms for a nationally consistent quality function, while ensuring regional execution is aligned, measured, and sustained. The Executive Director translates clinical quality, patient safety, regulatory, and incident trends into enterprise priorities, actionable improvement strategies, and executive-ready insights for operational, clinical, compliance, and board-level stakeholders.

This is an executive leadership role with selective direct involvement in the highest-risk and highest-complexity work. The Senior Director maintains sufficient proximity to investigations, survey readiness, and regional execution to ensure credibility with clinicians and operators, while primarily focusing on strategy, standards, governance, escalation, and system-level improvement across the enterprise.

Consistent with LifeStance's values, every member of the LifeStance team is expected to support each other and the mission, which may mean participating in projects and initiatives and performing functions and responsibilities not specifically outlined in this job description.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Team Leadership & Capability Building

• Lead, coach and develop regionally aligned Clinical Quality & Regulatory Managers, including hiring, onboarding, performance management and career development.

• Assign and balance regional coverage, monitor workload against real incident volume, and protect the team's capacity for proactive work against reactive casework.

• Build the capabilities the role requires, including analytic fluency, improvement methodology, regulatory literacy and influence without authority, through structured growth plans.

• Run a standing team cadence of individual check-ins and a department meeting, and create connection points with adjacent Chief Medical Office team members and other cross departmental functions so the team does not operate in isolation.

• Direct and mentor leaders in driving collaborative, cross-functional initiatives across Clinical Operations and Practice Operations to achieve strategic business and clinical objectives. 

• Serve as a key quality and risk partner to the Chief Operating Officer and Senior Clinical Operations leadership, leading the planning, communication, and implementation of enterprise-level quality, accreditation, and risk initiatives.

Quality & Safety Program Ownership

• Provide enterprise leadership for clinical quality, patient safety, critical incident management, quality-of-care concerns, and regulatory readiness. Define and govern the standards, decision-making frameworks, escalation processes, and measurement strategies that support consistent clinical quality across the organization, while partnering with Clinical Operations, Practice Operations, and field leaders on implementation and execution.

• Ensures timely execution and completion of incident reporting process and life cycle.

• Maintains and refines the incident classification and reporting standards that make clinic and regional data comparable.

• Consolidate regional findings into an enterprise view of themes, recurrence and risk, and prioritize which themes receive corrective action investment.

• Oversee enterprise morbidity and mortality (M&M) rounds

• Establish enterprise expectations for timely follow-through, corrective action validation, and sustained improvement, ensuring corrective actions are not closed until effectiveness has been re-measured and accountability is clear across clinical, operational, and regional leadership.

Regulatory, Accreditation & Survey Readiness

• Provide enterprise leadership for accreditation surveys, state licensure reviews, and regulatory readiness across the multi-state footprint, including executive escalation, coordination of market responses, and oversight of plans of correction through validated closure.

• Define processes and execution of chart audits related to medical necessity to support payor audits.  Support countermeasures of payor audit outcomes. 

• Maintain ongoing survey readiness by ensuring required documentation, evidence and supporting materials are continuously organized and updated, creating a state of perpetual readiness  

• Partner with Compliance and Legal to establish, communicate and maintain clear operational boundaries between clinical documentation and medical necessity review activities, which within the scope of this team and billing integrity functions, which are managed separately 

• Track regulatory and accreditation change across a multi-state footprint and translate it into practical guidance for regional clinical and operational leaders.

Governance, Peer Review & Stakeholder Partnership

• Prepare and present quality reporting to enterprise governance forums, including the Enterprise Quality Council and the Quality & Compliance Committee, and support board-level reporting.

• Manage, standardize, and support the peer review process, including preparation of committee materials, presentation of relevant quality and safety data, tracking of follow-through, and maintenance of objective, confidential clinical evaluation practices tied to continuous safety improvement, in coordination with Clinical Quality and regulatory managers.

• Secure and maintain sponsorship from regional vice presidents of operations and regional clinical/medical directors so the regional triad model functions as intended in every region.

Serve as the escalation point  for managers, Direct Casework & Regional Ownership

• Carry a defined region or portfolio directly, performing the same chart audit, investigation, trending and countermeasure work asked of the clinical quality managers.

• Lead investigations of sentinel-level events, cases with significant legal or reputational exposure, and cross-regional patterns. 

• Cultivate and model effective cross-functional partnerships, establishing trusted relationships with regional leaders and stakeholders through consistent collaboration, responsiveness and operational support

• Provide coverage for the quality team during leave, vacancy or surge without defaulting the work back onto the regions.

Data, Systems & Continuous Improvement

• Define the reporting the Quality team produces and the cadence by which it is delivered, including regular cadence of review, and  quarterly enterprise roll-up.

• Partner with data analytics and technology teams to transition key workflows to sustainable, platform-based solutions that improve accuracy, efficiency and user experience

• Apply continuous improvement methodology to the function's own workflows, including process mapping, root cause analysis and countermeasure design.

• Represent clinical quality requirements in enterprise system work, including electronic health record transition and measurement-based care initiatives.

REQUIREMENTS

• Master's degree in a behavioral health discipline, nursing, or a related clinical field.

• Active, unrestricted clinical license (for example LCSW, LMFT, LPC, PsyD, PhD, APRN or PA) preferred but not required; equivalent behavioral health quality, regulatory or clinical operations experience will be considered.

• Ten or more years in behavioral health service delivery, clinical quality, or clinical operations, including, including executive-level responsibility for quality strategy, regulatory oversight, performance improvement and organizational risk management across complex healthcare environment 

• Six or more years of leadership experience managing directors, managers and or cross-functional teams, with demonstrated success influencing executive stakeholders, leading large-scale quality transformation initiatives and developing leadership pipelines within growing healthcare organizations, with a track record of hiring, coaching and developing clinical or quality professionals.

• Demonstrated success leading regulatory readiness, accreditation, state licensure, and payer audit activities related to clinical quality and documentation, including development and execution of corrective action plans that drive sustained compliance.

• Demonstrated ability to build and interpret quality data and to present findings credibly to executive and board-level audiences.

• Willingness to carry selected direct casework alongside leadership responsibilities.

• Qualified candidates must be legally authorized to be employed in the United States

• LifeStance is an EEO/Affirmative Action Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.

• Demonstrates awareness, inclusivity, sensitivity, humility, and experience in working with individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, sexual orientations, gender identities, and other various aspects of culture.

PREFERRED SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

• Multi-state or national behavioral health experience, including outpatient, PHP, IOP or inpatient settings.

• Joint Commission or multi-state survey leadership experience.

• Process improvement experience such as Lean or Six Sigma green or black belt.

• Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) or comparable quality credentials or experience. 

• Experience with peer review, credentialing and privileging, and focused or ongoing professional practice evaluation.

• Experience implementing a quality, incident or risk management platform.

• Residence within one of the regions this position will support.

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of the job. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit, stand, bend, talk and hear. The employee is frequently required to walk (when on site). The employee must be able to lift and/or move objects up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, peripheral vision, depth perception and the ability to adjust focus.

IN OFFICE AND TRAVEL REQUIREMENTS

• Up to 50% travel to supported regions for audit, survey support and leadership presence. Travel is heaviest during survey preparation and active corrective action periods.

• Periodic travel to attend Chief Medical Office, division and enterprise leadership meetings.

• Residence within one of the supported regions is strongly preferred, so the Director can be on site quickly and is a known presence to regional leaders and clinicians.

COMPENSATION: $208,500 - $220,000/annually with bonus and equity potential

LifeStance provides the compensation range and benefits that it in good faith believes it might pay and/or offer for this position. LifeStance reserves the right to ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and offer additional benefits and other compensation, depending on circumstances not related to an applicant’s sex or other status protected by local, state, or federal law.

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LifeStance is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are fully committed to creating an inclusive work environment for all our employees. Learn more about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at LifeStance.

LifeStance Health complies with federal and state disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact our Human Resources Team at [email protected]. Please note: This contact is intended solely for accommodation requests. Inquiries regarding applications, resumes and applicant status should not be sent to this email address as they will not be reviewed or responded to. To apply for a position, please use our official careers page.