Krista Hughes, BCPA

Founder & CEO, Hughes Advocacy, LLC

 

Krista Hughes, BCPA (Board-Certified Patient Advocate), is the Founder and CEO of Hughes Advocacy, LLC, an independent patient advocacy firm based in Birmingham, Alabama. With 25+ years across the healthcare industry and more than a decade as a BCPA, she has supported 2,000+ patients and families nationwide across all healthcare settings, including outpatient, inpatient, emergency, skilled nursing, home health, hospice, and post-acute care.

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A national voice for patient safety and quality, Hughes was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra to serve a three-year term on the National Advisory Council for Healthcare Research and Quality for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). She is the first Alabamian known to have served on this council. In this role, she helped inform federal research priorities and strategies to improve healthcare delivery. She also served on the NAC's subcommittee (SNAC) supporting AHRQ's National Action Alliance to Advance Patient and Workforce Safety, contributing to the national effort to reduce preventable harm and move toward zero harm.

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She also serves on the Health Quality Innovators (HQI) Executive Leadership Council (ELC) through HQI’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO) work for the Southeast Region. HQI partners with providers to deliver no-cost, hands-on quality improvement support that strengthens CMS quality performance, reimbursement, and patient outcomes.

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Hughes is an educator with the Leapfrog Judie Burrows Education Institute, the educational arm of The Leapfrog Group, helping translate patient safety science into practical education for employers, providers, and the public. On behalf of the White House Office of American Innovation, Ms. Hughes was invited by Administrator Seema Verma to attend the Blue Button 2.0 Developers Conference at the White House to discuss ways to improve patient care and contribute to conversations on patient access, data portability, and consumer-centered innovation.

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Her work bridges the gap between what patients experience and what healthcare measures. She specializes in turning patient-reported experiences and outcomes into structured, usable data so leaders can identify safety signals earlier, prioritize the right interventions, and demonstrate measurable improvement over time. She advises healthcare organizations and health-tech innovators on operationalizing the "voice of the patient" into workflows, metrics, and accountability.

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She translates the patient voice into measurable signals leaders can act on - faster.

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Hughes is a Champion for Patients for Patient Safety - US (PFPS) and is active in the independent patient advocacy community, including Greater National Advocates. She is also an APHA Emeritus member of the Alliance of Professional Health Advocates (APHA).

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She is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of Alabama, where she earned a degree in communicative disorders.

 

Areas of Expertise

• Patient safety, preventable harm, and quality improvement

• Independent patient advocacy across the continuum of care

• Patient-reported experiences and outcomes (PRE/PRO) strategy and measurement

• Translating patient stories into structured insights for action and accountability

• Care navigation, communication, and shared decision-making

• Healthcare transparency and consumer access to health data

 

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