Development Team

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Dr. Bates is an internationally renowned expert in patient safety, information technology, cost-effectiveness, and outcomes assessment in medical practice. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he co-directs the Program in Clinical Effectiveness. He directs the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and serves as a lead for research in the World Health Organization’s Global Alliance for Patient Safety. He is immediate past president of the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua) and editor of the Journal of Patient Safety. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the American College of Medical Informatics, and was chairman of the Board of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Dr. Brooke leads surgical quality and health services research efforts in the University of Utah’s Department of Surgery, serving as section chief of the Health Services Research Section, director of the Utah Intervention Quality and Implementation Research (U-INQUIRE) group, and co-director of the Surgical Population Analytic Research Core (SPARC).  His research aimed at improving the quality of care delivered to surgical patients has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, PCORI, Veterans Administration, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Dr. Carson-Stevens is a Family Practitioner in a publicly funded healthcare system in Wales, UK, and a Full Professor of Patient Safety and Quality Improvement at Cardiff University. He has led or been part of teams that have carried out some of the largest reviews of adverse events worldwide. He advised and supported the World Health Organization to commission systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies estimating the frequency and burden of specific types of adverse events, and co-chaired a working group on ‘Measurement reporting, learning and surveillance’ at a Global WHO Consultation in February 2020.

Dr. Christopher Carpenter is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Vice Chair of Implementation and Innovation at Mayo Clinic-Rochester. Dr. Carpenter is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Academic Emergency Medicine, as well as Associate Editor for both the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and Annals of Internal Medicine’s ACP Journal Club. His research interests include diagnostics, geriatric emergency medicine, clinical practice guidelines, and implementation science. He co-authored the Enhancing the Quality and Transparency of Health Research (EQUATOR) Network’s Standards for Reporting of Implementation Research (StaRI) reporting guidelines.

Dr. Classen is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Utah and a Consultant in Infectious Diseases at The University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dr. Classen serves as a consulting CMIO advisor to Pascal. Dr. Classen is one of the co-developers of the “trigger” tool methodology at IHI, which resulted in the release of the Global Trigger Tool (GTT). The GTT is used to measure all-cause harm and has been used by more than 500 different healthcare organizations worldwide. The evidence-based trigger methodology provided an initial foundation for generating clinically validated adverse event outcomes using electronic healthcare record (EHR) data. Dr. Classen currently co-chairs the National Quality Forum’s AHRQ Common Formats Committee and is an advisor to the Leapfrog Group.

Ruth Ann Dorrill is an Assistant Inspector General (AIG) for the Office of Evaluation and Inspections, HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG). She has been with the OIG for 28 years and led national studies in evaluating hospital and nursing quality, safety, and emergency preparedness. She has led the OIG’s adverse events work since 2007, now conducting its 19th study of patient harm. Ruth Ann has also led management reviews of HHS programs, including the problematic implementation of HealthCare.gov and HHS management of the Indian Health Service. She has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee regarding nursing home quality and in 2021, received the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency Lifetime Achievement Award. Ruth Ann is a Senior Fellow at the Partnership for Public Service in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Tejal Gandhi, MPH, CPPS, is a renowned executive with an unwavering commitment and dedication to improving patient and workforce safety, developing innovative transformation strategies and advancing equity throughout the healthcare industry. As an executive sponsor of Safety 2025: Accelerate to Zero and Press Ganey’s Equity Partnership, Dr. Gandhi aims to improve the interconnectivity of employee engagement, patient safety and diversity, equity and inclusion throughout hospitals and health systems across the nation.

Dr. Griffey is Professor and Vice Chair for Quality and Safety in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine. He is an AHRQ-funded patient safety researcher and educator. Dr. Griffey completed the IHI and AHA-NPSF Patient Safety Fellowships. He is on the editorial board of Academic Emergency Medicine and developed the ED Trigger Tool.

Professor Peter Hibbert is a Program Manager with the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University. Prof Hibbert manages a $10.8 million grant researching translating safe care into practice. He is the stream lead for conducting appropriateness of care studies in the Institute’s Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science. Prior to this role, Prof Hibbert was the Associate Director of Patient Safety at the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA), London, United Kingdom where he led and managed clinical teams to reduce preventable patient harm in health care across England and Wales.

Dr. Klein is a senior researcher in quality and safety in the department of clinical epidemiology and medical technology assessment at Maastricht University Medical Center, The Netherlands. She is the author of studies evaluating the performance of record review as an instrument for measuring and improving quality and patient safety. She has expertise in clinical research, epidemiology, health promotion, clinical nutrition, dietetics and medicalnutrition therapy.

Dr. Akira Kuriyama is a Senior Lecturer at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine. His areas of expertise include critical care, endovascular treatments and general internal medicine. He has research expertise in conducting systematic reviews of both medical and surgical topics and is on the editorial board of international, primary care journals including the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Dr. Kwok is Deputy Head, Quality, Safety & Performance and Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa and a Clinician Investigator at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the School of Industrial Design, Carleton University and a Sessional Lecturer, Telfer School of Management. Dr. Kwok’s work focuses on quality and safety in acute unscheduled care.

Vice President, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), is IHI’s senior sponsor for the National Steering Committee for Patient Safety and President, Certification Board for Professionals in Patient Safety. She is the former Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Safety Programs at the National Patient Safety Foundation. Ms. McGaffigan is a Certified Professional in Patient Safety (CPPS), a graduate of the AHA- NPSF Patient Safety Leadership Fellowship Program, and a member of the Joint Commission National Patient Safety Committee, the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety Editorial Advisory Board, and the Advisory Committee of the Coalition to Improve Diagnosis. She serves as a Board Member of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors and on Planetree’s Person- Centered Certification Committee. Ms. McGaffigan represents IHI on numerous committees, task forces, and professional panels and is a frequent speaker at national and regional conferences. A recipient of the Lifetime Member Award from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, she received her BS in Nursing from Boston College and her MS in Nursing from Boston University.

Dr. Kenneth Michelson a pediatric emergency physician and health services researcher at Northwestern University. He is most interested in emergency system performance: how well do emergency departments care for children? How much capacity does our system have, and how do we maximize it? How can all emergency departments provide outstanding care for children? He wants to design interventions to bring pediatric expertise to all emergency departments in the nation. Using innovative methods, Dr. Michelson uses large healthcare databases to understand emergency department performance and design targeted interventions.

M. Hassan Murad, M.D., is a clinical epidemiologist who studies how evidence is generated, synthesized, appraised and applied. These activities can be collectively called evidence-based medicine or evidence- based health care practice. Dr. Murad’s research involves conducting various types of evidence synthesis, including systematic reviews, meta- analysis, network meta-analysis, meta-regression, meta-narrative synthesis and clinical practice guideline development. He also conducts methodology research that aims at improving the approaches of translational research.

Sarah Musy obtained a Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences from the University of Fribourg (CH) and a Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Bern. During her PhD, she used routine data to investigate the relationship between nursing staffing and adverse patient outcomes at the patient level in a longitudinal design. Her research focuses on the utilization of routine data to investigate nurse staffing, adverse events and quality of care funded by the Federal Office of Public Health, the Swiss National Science Foundation and INNOSUISSE.

Dr. Panagioti is based at the Centre for Primary Care and Health Services Research within the Division of Population Health, Health Services Research and Primary Care. Her academic career centers on designing and implementing co-created research to improve quality of care and patient safety for people with mental health challenges in primary care, spanning interfaces with secondary and social care across high and low-resource settings. She is also committed to optimizing the sustainability and efficiency of healthcare organizations through evidence-based workforce planning and wellbeing initiatives.

Dr. Rutjesis a physiotherapist, health services researcher, methodologist and senior lecturer at statistics at University of Medeno and Regio Emilia. She is an internationally recognized expert in evidence synthesis, leading and consulting assessment teams conducting (network) meta-analyses, health technology assessment (HTA) reports and clinical practice guidelines, mainly in the field of musculoskeletal and cardiovascular health, hematology and oncology. She has served as PI for multiple national and international projects. She was on the development team for the QUADAS risk bias tool and the STARD reporting guidelines.

Ryan Schneider is an acute care nurse practitioner and Patient Safety Coordinator in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Washington University with expertise in adverse event detection, record review methods and quality improvement. He is a frequent collaborator with Dr. Griffey.

Lucy Schulson is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and an Attending Physician in the Sections of General Internal Medicine. She is a practicing primary care doctor in the Immigrant and Refugee Health Center at Boston Medical Center. Her research is focused on how health systems can be improved to address gaps in quality of care and patient safety to improve equity.

Dr. Schwendimann is former Chief Patient Safety Officer of the University Hospital of Basel (2016-2022) and as a health service researcher affiliated with the University of Basel’s Institute of Nursing Science (INS). He was director of education at the INS from 2007-2015 where he developed and oversaw the Master of Science in Nursing study program and led various research projects related to health care professional outcomes, patient safety, safety culture and falls. .. He is author of several systematic reviews relevant to adverse event detection including “Trigger Tool–Based Automated Adverse Event Detection in Electronic Health Records: Systematic Review.”

Sheridan is co-founder and past President of Parents of Infants and Children with Kernicterus, which works in partnership with private and public health agencies to eradicate kernicterus. In 2003, Sheridan co-founded Consumers Advancing Patient Safety, a nonprofit organization that seeks a safe, compassionate and just healthcare system through proactive partnership between consumers and providers of care. Sheridan served as President of CAPS from 2003-2010. Sheridan received her BA from Albion College and her MIM and MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management. She has a professional background in international banking and served in Ecuador with her late husband, Pat, as Peace Corps volunteers. She lives in Boise, ID with her children, Cal and Mackenzie.

Michael Simon is Professor and Director of the Institute of Nursing Science and Head of the Department of Public Health at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Trained in Germany and with research positions in the US, UK and now Switzerland, his research interests center on nurse staffing, quality of care and adverse event detection and causal inference methodology. He is currently Co-PI on study on safety culture in Switzerland funded by the Swiss Federal Quality Commission and the Co-Investigator on the CroWiS-study on temporary nurse deployment and adverse events funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

Dr. Singh is Professor of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, the Co- Chief of the Health Policy, Quality and Informatics Program at the Houston VA Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety (IQuESt) based at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, and the Director of Houston DISCovery (Diagnosis Improvement Safety Center). Hi is a federally funded health services researcher with expertise in adverse events, medical and diagnostic error and the use of information systems and the electronic health records in promoting patient safety. His current research agenda focuses on understanding and reducing errors in the ambulatory care setting especially those involving missed and delayed diagnosis and in using health information technology to achieve safe and effective health care. He has published extensively on topics related to diagnostic error and diagnostic safety, and his research has informed several national patient safety initiatives and policy reports, including those by the National Academy of Medicine, US Department of Health and Human Services, National Quality Forum, American Medical Association, and the WHO.

At Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, David Stockwell, MD is the Chief Medical Officer of the Children’s Center as well as an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, practicing in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. Dr. Stockwell’s clinical interests include respiratory failure, pediatric shock, and other pediatric critical care presentations. He is an accomplished patient safety researcher, focusing on accurate and consistent patient safety even identification with numerous peer-reviewed publications in this and other aspects of patient safety and quality. He also serves as an Associate Editor of Pediatric Quality & Safety medical journal.

Dr. Eric Thomas is a professor of medicine at McGovern Medical School at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), and director of the UTHealth – Memorial Hermann Center for Healthcare Quality and Safety. Since 1992 he has conducted research on patient safety and his work was heavily cited in the Institute of Medicine’s landmark report on medical error. Dr. Thomas’ current research focuses on diagnostic errors, measuring safety culture, measuring, and improving teamwork, and the use of health information technology to improve quality and safety. In 2007, he received the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award.

Maria Unbeck is a Senior Lecturer in Nursing at School of Health and Welfare, Dalarna University in Sweden. She is a senior researcher within quality, patient safety and nursing with expertise in retrospective record review research methods for adverse event detection.

Dr. Winterstein is a pharmacist, pharmacoepidemiologist and health services researcher with a pharmacy degree from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn, Germany and a PhD in Pharmacoepidemiology from Humboldt University in Berlin. Her interests center on the evaluation of medications in pediatrics and pregnancy, infectious disease and psychiatry and the evaluation of policy surrounding medication use using real-world data. She chaired the Food and Drug Administration’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee from 2012-2018 and served as president of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology from 2019-2020. Dr Winterstein has participated in >50 extramurally funded projects, serving as PI, co-PI or PI of a subcontract for the majority of these, totaling more than $20 million of support from AHRQ, CMS, FDA, NIH, CDC, the state of Florida and professional associations/foundations. Key methodological emphasis areas have included (a) population-based pharmacoepidemiologic studies on drug effectiveness and safety, (b) contributions to pharmacoepidemiologic methods development especially in the area of measurement, (c) assessment of the quality of medication use and related policy and programs aimed at improving quality, and (d) development of clinical decision-support tools to improve medication use.