Jeff Norton

An engineer by education, Jeff Norton has been applying high-reliability manufacturing and lean principles in health with great success for more than a decade.

Norton’s career has spanned more than 25 years with significant, increasing responsibility and impact. He began as a computer consultant for Accenture and later became a manufacturing plant manager for 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. Most recently, he has taken on the role of chief performance officer and VP at UC Health, where he leads the performance improvement, quality and safety activities for the system.

Norton has hands-on experience leading quality and safety in an academic medical center and community hospital. 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, the Institute for Health Care Improvement (IHI) and America’s Essential Hospitals.

Areas of Expertise

• Lean/TPS principles applied to health care
• Quality and safety measurement
• Performance improvement
• High-reliability organization
• Swarming and incident response
• Hospital and clinic quality and safety organizational structure

Degrees

• BS - Mechanical Engineering

  • University of Illinois, Champaign

• MS - Mechanical Engineering

  • University of Illinois, Champaign