Practice Director - General Surgery, Plastic Surgery, and Allergy (Hybrid)

Overview

The Northwest Permanente Practice Director provides strategic leadership to regional General Surgery, Plastic Surgery, and Allergy departments, with a strong emphasis on surgical operations, perioperative workflows, patient access, resource utilization, and high-quality care delivery. This leader ensures equitable distribution of resources, cost-effective operations, and efficient management of staff in alignment with organizational goals, policies, and applicable regulatory requirements. The Practice Director manages major change initiatives across surgical service lines and represents operations within the region, with primary accountability for projects that cross departmental lines or have regional impact or significance. This position supports the strategic vision, leadership, and oversight of key initiatives and teams; defines required outcomes and milestones; drives performance targets; monitors results; optimizes resources; develops proposals and recommendations; and ensures delivery of measurable operational improvements. Prior surgical care delivery and surgical operations experience is critical to success in this role.Primary Responsibilities:

• Leads daily operations for General Surgery, Plastic Surgery, and Allergy services, ensuring timely access, reliable care delivery, effective staff deployment, and consistent service line performance.
• Provides operational leadership across surgical care delivery, including patient flow, scheduling, capacity management, provider templates, pre-operative workflows, post-referral coordination, and coordination with ancillary and procedural partners.
• Oversees performance monitoring, process improvement, and implementation of best practices to improve quality, safety, patient experience, access, productivity, and operational efficiency.
• Partners with physician leaders, clinicians, administrative teams, Primary Care, Specialty Care, ancillary departments, and regional operations to align surgical service line priorities and remove barriers to care delivery.
• Develops and tracks operational benchmarks, dashboards, and reporting tools to assess appointment supply and demand, surgical referral trends, backlog, utilization, staffing needs, and key performance indicators.
• Prepares recurring analyses, business cases, and internalization studies related to surgical access, procedural growth, staffing models, care transitions, cost drivers, service expansion, and resource allocation.
• Leads complex change initiatives that improve surgical operations, including workflow redesign, care model changes, access improvement work, technology implementation, and cross-functional process standardization.
• Manages departmental budgeting, financial monitoring, and prioritization of internal and external cost drivers while ensuring resources are aligned with patient care and operational needs.
• Partners on financial indicators and develops processes to ensure accurate financial capture, appropriate resource utilization, and sustainable operational performance.
• Builds strong relationships with physicians, clinicians, staff, and operational partners to foster accountability, engagement, continuous improvement, and a culture of high-quality, equitable care.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree AND six (6) years of experience in a directly related field OR a Master's degree in Business Administration, Health Care Administration, or related field.
• Three (3) years of experience managing business operations, healthcare administration, financial analysis, clinical operations, or another related field.
• Three (3) years of experience in a supervisory role or managing/leading highly complex service lines, financial management, budget development, program development, quality improvement, or project management.
• Demonstrated surgical care delivery or surgical operations experience, including experience supporting or leading perioperative, pre-operative, procedural, specialty surgery, ambulatory surgery, or surgical service line operations.
• Strong understanding of surgical and specialty care workflows, including referral management, access, scheduling, provider utilization, patient flow, clinical handoffs, and coordination across interdisciplinary teams.
• Experience using operational and financial data to identify trends, evaluate performance, build business cases, support decision-making, and drive quality, access, and efficiency improvements.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex change initiatives, manage competing priorities, and influence across departments in a fast-paced healthcare environment.
• Solid understanding of clinical workflows, licensure, regulatory requirements, and scope-of-practice considerations.
• Experience in ambulatory care, surgical access improvement, supply-demand modeling, capacity planning, and physician scheduling preferred.

For more information about this position, contact Marisa Walter, marisa.e.walter@kp.org.

About Northwest Permanente:We are the Permanente in Kaiser Permanente. Northwest Permanente is a self-governed, multi-specialty group of more than 1,300 physicians, clinicians, and administrative professionals caring for over 600,000 members in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Together with Kaiser Foundation Health Plans and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, we form Kaiser Permanente of the Northwest, an integrated health care program. Kaiser Permanente is one of the nation's pre-eminent health care systems, a benchmark for comprehensive, integrated, value-based, and high-quality care.Our Northwest Permanente administrative professionals enjoy a wide range of company sponsored benefits:

• 15% employer contribution to retirement programs, including pension.
• 90% employer-paid health plan
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Child Care Benefits
• Flexible Work Schedules
• Paid Parental Leave
• Self-Care Days + Paid Time Off

Equal Opportunity EmployerNorthwest Permanente is an equal opportunity employer committed to fair, respectful, and inclusive workplaces. Applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic or status.