Betty Jo Rocchio has served as Mercy’s senior vice president and chief nursing officer since October 2020. Previously, she was the chief nursing optimization officer beginning in April 2018. Betty Jo joined Mercy in August 2013 as vice president of perioperative services. Prior to joining Mercy, Betty Jo held several leadership positions in the Mount Carmel Health System in Columbus, Ohio. These included chief nurse anesthetist, system director of surgical services, and vice president of nursing and chief nursing officer.
Betty Jo has a passion and drive toward technology and analytics to assist nursing and clinical teams in patient care to drive optimal outcomes. She understands that collaboration in the industry, often outside of healthcare, produces unrivaled impact. Clinical innovation produces results when applied to solving healthcare’s biggest problems. In her tenure at Mercy, she has worked with a software company to co-develop an automated inventory management system to reduce nurse workload while adopting scanning technology to improve efficiency in an operating room. She has also collaborated to achieve HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) Stage 7 status with the development of a perioperative dashboard driving reduction in variation in the surgical patient with Epic data sets. Betty Jo is currently working on a nursing workforce strategy that includes matching patient demand and a “GIG” nursing workforce with a modern-nurse focused company that has the platform to support efficient and effective deployment.
Betty Jo holds a bachelor’s degree in nursing and an associate degree in business administration from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Steubenville, Ohio. She started her career in direct patient care as a registered nurse (RN) in the intensive care unit; returned to school to become a certified registered nurse anesthetist (CRNA) and at the same time earned her master’s degree in health sciences at LaRoche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Betty Jo holds certification in executive nurse practice (CENP) from American Organization for Nursing Leadership. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in nursing practice (DNP) in the nurse executive track at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
