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Digital EditionMeet 2025 Risk All Star Dr. Deeba Siddiqui of Hackensack Meridian Health
Health care consolidation has created a new reality where risk management can no longer operate in silos.
Dr. Deeba Siddiqui,
CRO, SVP team health
and safety, Hackensack
Meridian Health
As Dr. Deeba Siddiqui’s organization evolved through transformative growth and integration, the challenge became clear: diverse entities, each with distinct policies, processes and structures, needed to function as a cohesive whole.
This fragmentation created visibility gaps and inconsistent risk reporting across clinical, operational, workforce, reputational and strategic domains.
The pandemic intensified these challenges for Hackensack Meridian Health, testing existing frameworks and exposing the critical need for coordinated leadership, transparent reporting and agile response mechanisms.
What emerged was a stark recognition that traditional approaches to risk management developed for individual facilities were inadequate for complex, multi-site health care networks. The organization needed to close visibility gaps, standardize risk reporting and proactively address risks that spanned the entire enterprise.
Dr. Siddiqui’s response involved a comprehensive overhaul spanning organizational structure, culture and technology infrastructure. Her approach recognized that effective risk management in integrated health care systems requires both systematic processes and cultural transformation.
The structural transformation began with creating two new network-level divisions: safety and emergency management. These additions expanded the organization’s capacity for proactive risk mitigation, patient safety and crisis preparedness.
She established cohesive division structures by implementing standardized job descriptions, reorganizing reporting lines and developing unified frameworks that clarified roles and eliminated ambiguity. Perhaps most significantly, Dr. Siddiqui led a multi-year initiative to harmonize more than 384 hospitallevel policies into a single, standardized network-wide policy.
This effort required aligning stakeholders across 30-plus committees, culminating in successful implementation and laying groundwork for electronic consent systems. Cultural transformation proved equally critical. Dr. Siddiqui, the network’s CRO and SVP of team health and safety, championed psychological safety and transparent reporting grounded in high reliability organization principles.
This involved embracing errors as learning opportunities, empowering frontline staff and promoting a just culture framework that balanced accountability with learning and improvement.
The framework distinguished between human error, at-risk behavior and reckless behavior, ensuring fair treatment while encouraging open reporting. Financially, these efforts resulted in $17.5 million in cost avoidance, demonstrating strong return on investment in preventive risk strategies. Safety culture improvements were equally impressive.
The organization saw a 19% rise in safety and near-miss reports and a 25% increase in “Good Catch” submissions in 2024, reflecting the cultural shift toward transparency and early intervention.
From 2022 to 2024, targeted prevention strategies and collaborative safety efforts drove a 17.3 percent reduction in the Total Recordable Case rate and a 25.4 percent reduction in the DART rate. Operational efficiency gains included achieving a 96% harmonization rate in 2024 across ERM and team health & safety — a 56% improvement — through retirement of 246 outdated policies.
Dr. Siddiqui’s data-driven infrastructure proved crucial to these outcomes. &
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