Allen Kachalia, MD, JD, is the Chief Quality Officer for Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. In this role, he oversees the institution’s inpatient and ambulatory quality and safety initiatives. Dr. Kachalia is a general internist and practices as an academic hospitalist on the hospital wards with medical students and residents. Dr. Kachalia is also Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health where he teaches a course on legal issues in clinical medicine. His research focuses on how the law affects medical care, particularly how liability system reform and the disclosure of medical error relate to the quality and safety of healthcare.

Elizabeth Mort is a practicing general internist with more than fifteen years of experience in clinical performance management and operational improvement activities in an Academic Medical Center and Integrated Delivery System setting. Dr. Mort currently holds the titles of Senior Vice President of Quality and Safety, Chief Quality Officer at the MGH and the MGPO.

Dr Mort has extensive experience in health care quality measurement, quality and safety improvement, managed care medical management strategies, pay for performance contracting and hospital operations. At MGH she oversees the Center for Quality & Safety and is responsible for high stakes quality and safety measurement and improvement work across a broad range of initiatives. In her recent roles at Partners HealthCare as Senior Medical Director, she played leadership roles on system-wide initiatives related to quality, safety, contracting and pay for performance.

Dr. Mort has held many state and national roles on committees related to her field. She was on the AHA panel on Healthcare Acquired Conditions in 2011. She co-chaired the Mass Medical Society’s committee on the quality of medical practice until 2015. Dr. Mort has been a member of the NCQA’s Women’s Health Measurement Advisory Panel. She was a member of the National Quality Forums Technical Advisory Panel for the development of hypertension measures. She has served as a member of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Composite Measures Workgroup inpatient quality indicator sub-workgroup. She has served on the NQF Steering Committee for Additional Priorities for Acute Hospital Quality Measures. Dr. Mort also served on the NQF Expert Panel for Patient Reported Outcome measures, is co-chair of the NQF Expert panel on Measuring Affordability from the Patient’s Perspective, and a member of the NQF Person and Family Centered Care Steering Committee.

Dr. Mort completed her residency in primary care internal medicine at MGH in 1986 followed by two fellowship years at the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. She also completed a Masters in Public Health at the University of Michigan in 1982, which focused on Health Planning and Administration as well as Population Planning. Dr Mort is currently an Assistant Professor in both the Department of Medicine and Health Care Policy at HMS.

Stanley W. Ashley, MD is Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as the Frank Sawyer Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School.

A graduate of Oberlin College and Cornell University Medical College, he completed a residency in general surgery and joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. He subsequently spent 7 years at the University of California at Los Angeles and then moved to the Brigham where he has served as Program Director of the general surgery residency, Vice Chairman of the Department of Surgery, and most recently Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Ashley is a gastrointestinal surgeon whose primary interests are diseases of the pancreas and inflammatory bowel disease. His research, which has been funded by both the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institute of Health, has examined the pathophysiology of the pancreas and small bowel. His clinical research has examined both necrotizing pancreatitis and pancreatic neoplasia. His focus recently has been on practical aspects of quality and value and how these can be applied to improve outcomes. Closely related to this, he has an interest in physician education, both at the graduate and postgraduate (MOC) levels, and its integration into a certification/recertification process that ensures quality of care.

He is the author of more than 300 publications. He serves on numerous editorial boards, including the Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. He is editor of Current Problems in Surgery, and Scientific American Surgery. He is a former Chair of the American Board of Surgery and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).

David Westfall Bates, MD, MSc is an internationally renowned expert in patient safety, using information technology to improve care, quality of care, cost-effectiveness, and outcomes assessment in medical practice. He is the Chief Innovation Officer and a Senior Vice President at BWH.

At a time when patient safety has become a key driver for focusing national attention on healthcare quality, Dr. Bates' work has not only shown the magnitude of the problem but also provided a blueprint for helping solve it. He led a seminal study on the epidemiology of drug-related injuries, demonstrating that the most effective way to prevent serious medication errors is to focus on improving the systems. He has also performed many studies on how computerized, evidence based guidelines can improve quality and efficiency. Dr. Bates has been recognized for several years by Modern Healthcare magazine as one of the “100 most powerful” individuals in US health care.

In addition to serving as a practicing general internist and chief of General Internal Medicine, Bates also 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 also serves as medical director of Clinical and Quality Analysis for Partners HealthCare. He directs the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at BWH, and served previously as external program lead for research in the World Health Organization’s Global Alliance for Patient Safety. He is the editor of the Journal of Patient Safety.

Bates is a graduate of Stanford University and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He began his fellowship in general internal medicine at BWH in 1988, and he received an MSc in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1990.

Kathryn Britton, MD, MPH is a practicing cardiologist and the Medical Director of Care Transitions at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. In her role within the BWH Department of Quality of Safety, Dr. Britton is charged with enhancing the quality of care for patients as they transition through the care continuum. Some specific examples of this work include efforts to improve the quality and coordination of post-acute care and to reduce preventable readmissions.

Dr. Cooper currently serves as Executive Director of the Center for Medical Simulation but expects to be in an Emeritus role within the coming year. He is internationally renowned in the anesthesia community for his seminal contributions to the prevention of adverse events and patient injury and is considered a pioneer in the development of medical simulation. His studies of human error in medicine in the 1970s were among the first ever conducted but surely the first to find practical implementation. Dr. Cooper was the founding Director of Biomedical Engineering of Partners HealthCare serving in that role from 1995-2009. He was one of the Founders of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) in 1985. This was the first organization in the world that focused solely on patient safety. Some years later, research that APSF supported led Dr. Cooper to see the benefit of simulation training for patient safety. He will continue in roles at the MGH and CMS, working with residents and faculty in helping them to be more self-reflective, to think more deeply about how they make mistakes, how accidents happen and how to prevent them. In addition to a broad focus in patient safety, simulation for teamwork, learning and performance assessment without putting patients at risk is his primary interest.

Dr. Dankers grew up in Monroe, WA and attended Williams College where he studied Philosophy and played soccer. After college, he worked for three years at the Advisory Board Company in Washington D.C., which provides business strategy research and consulting services for hospitals. He then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his M.D. and M.B.A. He completed internal medicine residency at The Massachusetts General Hospital and remained at the MGH for three years following residency, splitting his time between clinical work as a hospitalist and quality and safety work as a member of the Edward P. Lawrence Center for Quality and Safety. In 2013, Dr. Dankers joined the Department of Quality and Safety at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as the Associate Medical Director for Quality and Safety. He continues to practice as a hospitalist and is particularly interested in Hospital Acquired Condition reduction and in strengthening safety culture through the application of Just Culture principles.

Dr. Desai’s contributions at Brigham & Women’s hospital (BWH) cover clinical care, research, administrative, and teaching roles. She sees complex rheumatology patients at the BWH Arthritis Center, a busy, tertiary care referral practice with both local and regional referrals and at the BWH Fish Center for Women’s Health, a multispecialty practice with a unique, integrated care model for women with rheumatic diseases. Investigation is also a significant activity for Dr. Desai, with 16 peer-reviewed and 5 other publications. She has completed a three-year Physician Scientist Development Award from the American College of Rheumatology (2009-2012) and has a MPH degree to support her clinical research in ambulatory quality and safety.

Dr. Desai serves as the Director of Quality for the Department of Medicine (DOM) and the Director of Ambulatory Patient Safety at BWH. As Director of Quality for the DOM, Dr. Desai has had five years of practical experience working directly with all 11 divisions within the DOM to select, measure, and improve performance on quality metrics. In addition, she has expanded the scope of the DOM’s Quality Program to encompass regulatory and safety requirements (Meaningful Use, maintenance of certification, medication reconciliation). As the Director of Ambulatory Patient Safety for BWH, Dr. Desai works across the over 140 ambulatory practices. At present, our Ambulatory Patient Safety team is leading several hospital-wide initiatives, on 1) enhancing the safety culture, 2) improving feedback to staff who file safety reports, 3) increasing rates of medication reconciliation, and most recently 4) developing a closed loop framework for key cancer related test results. My position as Medical Director for Ambulatory Patient Safety is an opportunity to develop an infrastructure to capture patient safety concerns and make system-level improvements, interfacing with Partners Healthcare and eCare committees regularly. An executive education course at Harvard Business School (2011-2012) designed for clinicians at BWH, has provided Dr. Desai with additional leadership skills.

In addition, in 2015 Dr. Desai became the Program Director for the Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership (SQIL) Program at Harvard Medical School. This innovative blended learning, master’s level, certificate course for global students has the goal of preparing the next generation of leaders in health care globally. Dr. Desai has lectured to students in SQIL both in London and Dubai, teaching the fundamentals of quality, safety and informatics.

Dr. Desai attended college and medical school at Brown University in Providence, RI where she graduated with Honors. She went on to do her residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, MA followed by a Rheumatology fellowship at both BIDMC and BWH and a Chief Residency at BIDMC. She has served as faculty in the Rheumatology Division at BWH and an assistant professor of Medicine at HMS.

As Chief Medical Officer for the Brigham and Women’s Physician’s Organization (BWPO), Dr. Dudley is responsible for the strategic development and oversight of physician led efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of clinical care. Dr. Dudley oversees the BWPO’s performance in risk contracts across commercial payers and as a Pioneer Accountable Care Organization with Medicare. As Vice President for Care Redesign for Brigham and Women’s HealthCare, Dr. Dudley is responsible for coordinating institutional and physician led efforts to develop population health management and care redesign programs that support the delivery of high value patient care with a focus on reducing overall medical trend and improving quality performance.

Dr. Dudley has been active in the development of education and training programs to support the development of physician leaders including a leadership program with Harvard Business School. Dr. Dudley developed a physician incubator program to increase front line physician engagement in identifying opportunities to redesign care to deliver improved outcomes and quality and reduce overall healthcare costs.

Previously, Dr. Dudley served as a Medical Director within the Partners HealthCare System addressing trend and quality performance across its Academic and Community hospital network. Dr. Dudley also served as Medical Director for Partners Human Resources supporting the development and management of the pharmacy benefit for Partners employees and their dependents including contracting and on-going formulary management.

Dr. Dudley received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and medical degree from Harvard Medical School. She completed her internship and residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, where she was a practicing primary care physician for 10 years. Dr. Dudley is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Dr. Ferris is a practicing general internist and pediatrician and the Senior Vice President for Population Health Management at Partners Healthcare and MGH. He is formally the Vice Chair for Quality for Partners Pediatrics and Mass General Hospital for Children and the Medical Director of the Mass General Physicians Organization. He is also a Senior Scientist in the Mongan Institute for Health Policy and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research has focused on the measurement and improvement of health care quality for adults and children, particularly focused on the roles of financing and health information technology. In addition to quality improvement interventions he has published studies on the effects of the organization and financing of care on the costs and quality of care, risk adjustment of quality measures, and disparities in health care. He has over 100 publications including those in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Pediatrics, and Health Affairs. In his current role, Dr. Ferris leads efforts at Partners Healthcare to improve quality of care while reducing costs of care.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is the founder and Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. And he is also co-founder and chairman of Lifebox, an international not-for-profit implementing systems and technologies to reduce surgical deaths globally.

He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 1998. He has written four bestselling books: Complications, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002; Better, which was selected as one of the ten best books of 2007 by Amazon.com; The Checklist Manifesto, and most recently, Being Mortal. He has won two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on health care, a MacArthur Fellowship, and he has been named one of the world’s hundred most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy and TIME.

Gregg S. Meyer, MD, MSc, is the Chief Clinical Officer of the Partners Healthcare System in Boston, Massachusetts, responsible for overall direction, operations, and management of system aspects of healthcare delivery throughout the Partners Healthcare delivery system.

Before returning to the Partners system Dr Meyer served as the Chief Clinical Officer and Executive Vice-President for Population Health at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs and Paul B. Batalden Professor and Chair at the Geisel School of Medicine. Prior to coming to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Meyer served as Senior Vice President for the Edward P. Lawrence Center for Quality and Safety at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts General Physicians Organization (MGPO) and the Medical Director of the MGPO.

Dr. Meyer was previously the Director of the Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). He has served on numerous key committees related to quality and safety including the Joint Commission’s Board of Commissioners, National Committee for Quality Assurance’s Committee on Performance Measurement, the World Health Organization’s Scientific Peer Review Group on Health Systems Performance Assessment, Institute of Medicine panels, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Payment Reform Advisory Committee, the National Patient Safety Foundation’s Board of Directors, and NASA’s Medical Policy Board.

Before his tenure at AHRQ, Dr. Meyer was an Associate Professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) where he served as Division Director for General Medicine, coordinated the design and analysis of the Department of Defense's National Quality Management Project, and developed curricula for senior military medical leaders in quality improvement. While at USUHS Dr. Meyer was an active duty Medical Corps officer and Colonel in the United States Air Force. Dr. Meyer is a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Union College and magna cum laude graduate of Albany Medical College. He earned a Masters degree at Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In addition, he holds a masters degree from the Department of Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Meyer also served as a fellow in the U. S. Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee’s health office. He has authored over 100 articles, editorials, chapters and monographs and is board certified in Internal Medicine.

Dr. Miller is a practicing cardiologist with a primary interest in the interface of clinical information systems with clinical care, and the effects of that interface on clinician training and workflow, patient safety, and quality improvement. She received her BS in Biomedical Engineering from University of Iowa, and an MS and PhD in Neuroscience and MD from the University of Michigan. Dr. Miller currently divides her time among clinical practice, serving as medical advisor to the BWH Biomedical Engineering team, and administrative activities at the division, department, hospital, and enterprise level with emphasis on IS/clinical informatics and patient safety in her role as the CMIO for Inpatient Clinical Services at BWH.

Dr. Miller is an Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Editor for the BWH Interactive Clinical Problem Solving Series of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr Pian-Smith is the Director of Quality and Safety in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care & Pain Medicine. In this role, she oversees the Quality Assurance Committee and the Quality & Safety Improvement Committee. She also serves on the Quality of Care Committee of the MGH Board of Trustees and the Quality & Patient Safety Committee of MGH.

She is a graduate of the Comprehensive Patient Safety Leadership Fellowship of the American Hospital Association and the National Patient Safety Foundation. She completed the Rabkin Fellowship in Medical Education and the Rabkin Advanced Fellowship in Medical Education, both at HMS. During her fellowships, and as the PI of a Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER) grant, Dr. Pian-Smith developed and implemented innovative curriculum at the Center for Medical Simulation and at MGH to teach clinicians the skills and language of "speaking up". Specifically the lessons foster collaborative questioning and challenging across hierarchical gradients, with the goal of improving patient safety, supporting education, and enhancing the role of all members of care teams. She has published on this topic and lectures nationally and internationally.

She is Co-Investigator of a CRICO grant for simulation-based team-training of operating room personnel, and serves as Simulation Officer for the department of Anesthesia. She also regularly leads simulation drills internationally, to improve teamwork and patient safety in underserved areas.

An Associate Professor of Anesthesia, she was a founding member of the OB Anesthesia service at MGH. She has been instrumental in establishing clinical practice guidelines, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, and championing educational and safety programs. Through the years, her clinical research has focused on women's health issues; including pre-eclampsia, hemodynamic changes during cesarean delivery, the use of integrative therapy (acupuncture) for pelvic pain, hypertension and menopausal hot flashes, and simulation training for the management of obstetrical crises. She is on the Editorial Board of OpenAnesthesia.org, an innovative on-line learning resource for anesthesiology and is Chair of the Education Committee of the Society of Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology (SOAP).

Dr Pian-Smith has received numerous teaching and patient safety awards, including "Teacher of the Year" from the Society of Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology and the “Safety Star Award” from MGH. She also serves in numerous academic leadership positions. Notably, she was inducted into the Association of University Anesthesiologists (AUA) where she serves on the Education Advisory Board. She is an elected member of the Academy of Anesthesiology. She is a charter member of the prestigious FAER Academy of Education Mentors, and serves on the Study Section to review grants funded through FAER.

Dr Pian-Smith received her BA in Biology from Harvard University and an MS in Pharmacology and Physiology from Cornell University. She attended medical school at SUNY Stony Brook and completed her internship in Medicine and Surgery at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Upon graduating from her residency in Anesthesiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, she joined the staff at MGH in 1994.

Dr. Schnipper is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Director of Clinical Research for the Brigham and Women’s Hospitalist Service.

His research interests focus on improving the quality of health care delivery for general medical patients. Subject areas include safe and effective medication use, transitions in care, and communication among health care providers and between patients and providers. The quality improvement interventions that he studies include innovations in health information technology, more effective use of hospital-based pharmacists, and process redesign using continuous quality improvement methods.

Dr. Schnipper is a graduate of Harvard College. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1996. He completed a residency in internal medicine and primary care at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2001, he completed a fellowship in general internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and earned an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health in Clinical Effectiveness.

Jeremiah (Jay) Schuur, MD, MHS, is a practicing emergency physician with a research focus on health care quality and policy. He is the Vice Chair of Quality and Safety and Chief of the Division of Health Policy Translation for the Department of Emergency Medicine of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Schuur’s research focuses on developing, implementing and evaluating measures of quality of care and patient safety in emergency medicine and the intersection of emergency care and health policy. Current research areas include development and evaluation of performance measures, quality improvement strategies, preventing healthcare associated infections (HAIs) and variation and cost of emergency department care. Dr. Schuur has experience with a number of publicly available data sets which are a good source of data for resident and student projects. Dr. Schuur is enthusiastic about collaborating with interested residents or students. Dr. Schuur has expertise in specialty society engagement in national policy. He is active on committees and taskforces for the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) around measuring quality and safety of emergency care. He is currently co-lead of ACEP’s Specialty Alignment Network, a 4-year, $3 million project that is part of CMS’s Transforming Clinical Practices Initiative. He has been funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Massachusetts, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and he has published over 80 peer-reviewed manuscripts. More information is available here.

Dr. Sequist is the Chief Quality and Safety Officer at Partners HealthCare, where he works with the leadership of multiple hospitals and institutions to measure and improve the delivery of health care across the care continuum. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, with joint appointments in the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. Previous to his current role, Dr. Sequist served as a general internist and Director of Research and Clinical Program Evaluation at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates and Atrius Health. Dr. Sequist’s research interests include ambulatory quality measurement and improvement, with a focus on patient and provider education, and the innovative use of health information technology. Dr. Sequist is particularly interested in health policy issues affecting care for Native Americans, and has worked collaboratively with the Indian Health Service to evaluate the provision of care for this population.

Dr. Sequist is a member of the Taos Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and is committed to improving Native American health care, serving as the Director of the Four Directions Summer Research Program at Harvard Medical School and the Medical Director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Physician Outreach Program with the Indian Health Service. He graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in chemical engineering. He received his M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School, and his M.P.H. degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.

David M. Shahian, MD, is Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Vice President of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Quality and Safety, and Associate Director of the MGH Codman Center for Clinical Effectiveness in Surgery. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Shahian trained in general surgery at MGH and was a fellow in cardiothoracic surgery at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. For nearly two decades, Dr. Shahian was Chair of the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Lahey Clinic.

In addition to his clinical career, Dr. Shahian has been involved in a variety of health policy issues, particularly in the areas of performance measurement and public reporting. As Chair of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) Workforce on National Databases and its Quality Measurement Task Force, he has led the development of more than 40 risk models and composite performance measures. Dr. Shahian has been a leader in the implementation of the mandatory cardiac surgery public reporting initiative in Massachusetts and the voluntary, nationwide public reporting program established by The Society of Thoracic Surgeons.

Dr. Shahian is the author or co-author of over 180 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His research has focused on performance measurement and related health policy issues, as well as clinical cardiac surgery. Dr. Shahian is a member of the NQF Board of Directors and Executive Committee. He was a member of the Technical Advisory Panels for the NQF Composite Measure Guidance Reassessment and Cardiac Surgery projects, and the Steering Committee for its Composite Measures project. He also served as Chair of the NQF Evidence Task Force. Dr. Shahian is Co-Chair of the PCPI National Quality Registry Network.

Dr. Thompson practices internal medicine at MGH, seeing outpatients in the MGH Internal Medicine Associates, and inpatients as part of the MGH Complex Care Service and Bigelow Teaching Service. He is responsible for quality improvement, population health management, and care redesign strategies in the MGH Department of Medicine, and is responsible for several MGPO programs related to improving care transitions. He is also responsible for hospital-wide efforts to reduce hospital readmissions. He has a longstanding interest in educating residents and fellows in health policy, health care systems, and quality improvement. Dr. Thompson leads the the Partners Center of Expertise Health Policy Certificate Program, an annual one week course composed of discussions with local and national experts in health policy, as well as field visits to policy-related settings and organizations.