Carole Stockmeier

Carole Stockmeier is the Senior Vice President of Safety & Reliability Solutions at Press Ganey. She leads the development and integration of methods and solutions to help healthcare organizations optimize safety and performance excellence. Specific areas of interest include reliability competency, organizational resilience, harm measurement, and solutions and analytics for event learning and improvement.

With over 23 years of experience in safety science and high-reliability organizing, Carole was a founder and Chief Operating Officer of Healthcare Performance Improvement (HPI). She has coached healthcare leaders in comprehensive safety and reliability culture transformation, resulting in recognized and published outcomes in safety and return on investment. Before the formation of HPI, she served as the Director of Safety and Performance Excellence at Sentara Healthcare, recipient of the 2004 AHA Quest for Quality Prize and the 2005 John M Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award. 

Carole led the earliest applications of reliability leadership methods in healthcare, including the widely practiced Daily Safety Check-In. She was a developer of the HPI SEC© & SSER© Patient Safety Measurement System for Healthcare as well as Focus & SimplifySM methodology for human factors integration in work process and protocol development. With a philosophy of “all share, all learn”, Carole was a founding convener and strategic leader of the HPI Safety Summit, a highly regarded gathering for organizations engaged in safety and high-reliability organizing.

Within Press Ganey, Carole is a member of the PG Patient Safety Organization (PSO) executive steering committee and a co-lead for the PG PSO High Reliability Learning Series and the PG Safety Leadership Council. At a national level, she has served on the National Action Plan to Advance Patient Safety (NAP) Working Group and as a board member of the Alliance for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (AQIPS). Carole is a contributing author of Zero Harm: How to Achieve Zero Harm in Patient and Workforce Safety.



Carole resides in Chesapeake, Virginia. Outside of work, she can be found supporting her son’s robotics team, playing flute at her church, and connecting with and coaching women diagnosed with breast cancer. She has served as a member of the Old Dominion University Women’s Initiative Network (WIN), a professional development program for first-generation college students. Carole holds a Bachelor of Science in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a Master of Health Administration from the Medical College of Virginia.