Appendix C
Committee Member Biographies
Gary Kaplan, M.D., FACP, FACMPE (Chair), has served as Chairman and CEO of the Virginia Mason Health System since 2000. He is also a practicing internal medicine physician at Virginia Mason. Dr. Kaplan received his medical degree from the University of Michigan and is board certified in internal medicine. Since Dr. Kaplan became Chairman and CEO, Virginia Mason has received significant national and international recognition for its efforts to transform health care. The Leapfrog Group named Virginia Mason “Top Hospital of The Decade” for patient safety and quality, a distinction shared with only one other hospital. For the fifth consecutive year, The Leapfrog Group also named Virginia Mason as 1 of 65 U.S. hospitals to be designated as a “Top Hospital.” In addition, Virginia Mason has received HealthGrades’ “Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence” for 5 consecutive years. Virginia Mason is considered to be the national leader in deploying the Toyota Production System to health care management. In addition to his patient-care duties and position as CEO, Dr. Kaplan is a clinical professor at the University of Washington and has been recognized for his service and contribution to many regional and national boards, including the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Medical Group Management Association, the National Patient Safety Foundation, the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and the Washington Healthcare Forum. Dr. Kaplan is a founding member of Health CEOs for Health Reform. In 2007, Dr. Kaplan was designated a fellow in the American College of Physician Executives. In 2011, he was named the 12th most influential U.S. physician leader in health care by Modern Healthcare magazine, and the same publication ranked Dr. Kaplan 33rd on its list of the “100 Most
Influential People in Healthcare.” In 2012, he was named the second most influential U.S. physician leader in health care by the same publication. In 2009, Dr. Kaplan received the John M. Eisenberg Award from the National Quality Forum and The Joint Commission for Individual Achievement at the national level for his outstanding work and commitment to patient safety and quality. Additionally, he was recognized by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) as the recipient of the Harry J. Harwick Lifetime Achievement Award. Each year, the MGMA and the American College of Medical Practice Executives honor one individual who has made outstanding nationally recognized contributions to health care administration, delivery, and education in his or her career, advancing the field of medical practice management.
Jana Bazzoli, M.B.A., M.S.A., CMPE, joined the Cincinnati Children’s Research Foundation and the Department of Pediatrics as vice president of Clinical Affairs. Ms. Bazzoli has nearly 20 years’ experience in hospital administration, having earned her M.B.A. at Augusta State University in Georgia and her M.S.A. at Central Michigan University. Her most recent position was associate administrator of outpatient operations at Nemours/Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware. At Cincinnati Children’s, Ms. Bazzoli works closely with departmental business directors and division directors to improve clinical care and systems. One of her primary responsibilities is to develop and implement new initiatives to achieve the departments’ clinical, operational, and academic goals while maintaining Cincinnati Children’s quality of care.
James C. Benneyan, Ph.D., is a leading authority on health care systems engineering, founding director of two federally awarded health care engineering centers, and professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Northeastern University. Dr. Benneyan has served as director, codirector, principal investigator, or co–private investigator in seven engineering research centers, and research laboratories totaling more than $32 million in funding. His research focuses on mathematical modeling and optimization of health care systems broadly, with particular emphasis and area expertise in patient safety, access, logistics, comparative effectiveness, quality, and treatment optimization. Dr. Benneyan currently serves as a director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Organization Transformation, the New England U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Engineering Resource Center, and Northeastern’s Quality and Productivity research laboratory. The work of these three enterprises collectively integrates academic research, real-world application, and workforce development. Methods research foci include statistical quality engineering, probabilistic optimization, computer simulation, risk-adjusted statistical
methods, rare events, spatial surveillance, risk-benefit, and comparative effectiveness models. Benneyan has published more than 100 papers and served as senior or associate editor of 4 academic journals in the above areas, has received 6 teaching, service, and research awards, and has taught engineering to ages 6 through 60. Dr. Benneyan is a vice president of the Institute for Industrial Engineers (IIE), past president of the Society for Health Systems (SHS), senior fellow and faculty at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, fellow of SHS and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), operations research faculty for Northeastern’s NSF-Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, Center for High-Rate Nanomanufacturing (CHN), and board member or advisor for several health care organizations. Prior to joining Northeastern, Dr. Benneyan was senior systems engineer for Harvard Community Health Plan, principal of Productivity Sciences Incorporated, and an industrial engineer at IBM and later Digital Equipment Corporation. Primary funding sources include NSF, National Institutes of Health, Veterans Health Administration, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Regenstreif Institute, United Network for Organ Sharing, U.S. Air Force Surgeon General’s Office, and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
James Conway, M.S., is an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and Senior Consultant for Safe and Reliable Healthcare in Evergreen, Colorado. From 2006 to 2009 he was Senior Vice President of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and from 2005 to 2011, Senior Fellow. During 1995-2005, Mr. Conway was Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston. Prior to joining DFCI, he had a 27-year career at Children’s Hospital, Boston, in Radiology Administration, Finance, and as Assistant Hospital Director. His areas of expertise and interest include governance and executive leadership, patient safety, change management, crisis management, and patient- and family-centered care. He holds a Master of Science degree from Lesley College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mr. Conway is the winner of numerous awards, including the 1999 ACHE Mass. Regents Award, the 2001 first Individual Leadership Award in Patient Safety by The Joint Commission and the National Committee for Quality Assurance. In 2008, he received the Picker Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Patient Centered Care, in 2009 the Mary Davis Barber Heart of Hospice Award from the Massachusetts Hospice and Palliative Care Federation, and in 2012 both the Institute for Patient and Family Centered Care Leadership Award and the first Honorary Fellowship of the National Association for Healthcare Quality. A Lifetime Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives, he has served as a Distinguished Advisor to the Lucian Leape Institute for the National Patient Safety Foundation. Institute of Medicine (IOM)
committees have included Identifying and Preventing Medication Errors and a Learning Healthcare System. Current board service includes board member Winchester Hospital; board member American Cancer Society, New England Region; and member, Board of Visitors, University of Massachusetts, Boston. In government service, he served from 2006 to 2010 as a member of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Quality and Cost Council.
Susan Dentzer is Senior Policy Adviser to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy focused on health and health care in the United States. In this role, she works closely with foundation leaders to carry out the organizational mission of building a culture of health and improving the health and health care of all Americans. One of the nation’s most respected health and health policy thought leaders and journalists, she is also an on-air analyst on health issues on the PBS NewsHour. From 2008 to April 2013, she was the editor-in-chief of Health Affairs, the nation’s leading peer-reviewed journal of health policy, and led the transformation of that journal from a bimonthly academic publication into a highly topical monthly publication and website with more than 120 million page views annually. From 1998 to 2008, she led the PBS NewsHour’s health unit as on-air health correspondent and was the recipient of numerous honors and awards. Ms. Dentzer is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the Council on Foreign Relations. Ms. Dentzer graduated from Dartmouth College, is a trustee emerita of the college, and chaired the Dartmouth Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2004. She is a member of the Board of Overseers of Dartmouth Medical School and is a member of the board of directors of the International Rescue Committee, a leading humanitarian organization. She is also on the board of directors of Research!America, an alliance working to make research to improve health a higher priority; is a public member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Medical Specialties; and is a member of the board of directors of the Health Data Consortium, which seeks to foster use of public and private data to improve the health and health care of Americans. A widely admired communicator, Ms. Dentzer is a frequent speaker before a wide variety of health care and other groups and a frequent commentator on such National Public Radio shows such as the Diane Rehm Show and This Life.
Eva Lee, Ph.D., is a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare, a center established through funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Whitaker Foundation. The center focuses on biomedicine, public health, and defense, advancing domains from basic science to translational medical research; intelligent, quality, and cost-effective delivery;
and medical preparedness and protection of critical infrastructures. She is a Distinguished Scholar in Health Systems, Health System Institute at Georgia Tech and Emory University. She is also co-director of the Center for Health Organization Transformation, an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. Dr. Lee partners with hospital leaders to develop novel transformational strategies in delivery, quality, safety, operations efficiency, information management, change management, and organizational learning. Dr. Lee’s research focuses on mathematical programming, information technology, and computational algorithms for risk assessment, decision making, predictive analytics and knowledge discovery, and systems optimization. She has made major contributions in advances to medical care and procedures, emergency response and medical preparedness, health care operations, and business intelligence and operations transformation. Dr. Lee received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program Young Investigator Award for research on optimization and parallel algorithms and their applications to large-scale logistics and medical applications. She is the first and only industrial engineer/operations research recipient for the prestigious Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Grant for Young Investigators. In 2005, she received the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences Pierskalla Best Paper Award for research excellence in HealthCare Management Science for her work on emergency response and planning, large-scale prophylaxis dispensing, and resource allocation for bioterrorism and infectious disease outbreaks. Together with Dr. Marco Zaider from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, they were named winners of the 2007 Franz Edelman award for their work on using operations research to advance cancer therapeutics. Dr. Lee was selected by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to serve on the organizing committee and to lead the “Engineering the Healthcare Delivery System’’ cluster for the 2009 NAE Frontiers of Engineering Symposium for outstanding young engineers. In 2011, her work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on emergency response and mass dispensing was selected as an Edelman finalist. In the same year, her paper on vaccine response immunogenicity prediction in Nature Immunology was named “Paper of the Year” by the International Vaccine Society. Her work on optimizing and transforming emergency department workflow and patient care was recognized as second prize winner in the 2013 Daniel H. Wagner Prize Excellence in Operations Research Application. She has received seven patents on innovative medical systems and devices.
Eugene Litvak, Ph.D., is President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Optimization (IHO). He is also an Adjunct Professor in Operations Management in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he teaches the course “Opera-
tions Management in Service Delivery Organizations.” Since 1995 he has been leading the development and practical application of the innovative Variability Methodology for cost reduction and quality improvement in health care delivery systems. Application of this methodology has resulted in significant quality improvement and multimillion dollar margin improvements for every hospital that has applied it. Dr. Litvak was a member of the Institute of Medicine committees on The Future of Emergency Care in the United States Health System and The Learning Healthcare System in America, as well as a member of the National Advisory Committee to the American Hospital Association for Improving Quality, Patient Safety and Performance. On behalf of IHO, he serves as principal investigator in many hospital operations improvement projects in the United States and internationally, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services–funded Partnership for Patients initiative with 14 hospitals in New Jersey and the nationwide Whole System Patient Flow Improvement initiative in Scotland.
Mark Murray, M.D., is an international authority on the development of access and flow systems within health care. He has specific expertise in areas such as patient access to appointments in primary, specialty, and ancillary care; patient access to information; and health care demand/supply matching and balance. Drawing from his direct experience in health care delivery and management, Dr. Murray has a unique perspective as a physician who practiced in multiple environments, as well as an understanding of how other businesses and industries use flow and demand/supply matching. He has also initiated and developed multioperational quality improvement efforts and has consulted with health care organizations worldwide on a variety of quality improvement strategies, including efficiencies in office practices, the development of health care teams, change management in health care settings, physician compensation, and “big system” flow. Dr. Murray has worked with various types of organizations, including the U.S. government; fee-for-service and capitated environments; health practices, systems, plans, and organizations; insurance companies; and various medical groups. In addition, he has worked extensively abroad. Dr. Murray completed his undergraduate training at St. Mary’s College in California; attended Creighton University Medical School in Omaha, Nebraska; completed a residency in Family Medicine at the University of California, Davis; and obtained a master’s degree in Health Services Administration from St. Mary’s College. Following his medical training, he organized and developed a medical practice in an underserved rural area in Northern California. He also worked for Kaiser Permanente for 19 years, holding various administrative positions, including Assistant Chief of Medicine, North Sacramento Valley, where he had operational responsibility for the care of 270,000 patients; and director
of a regional call center that served 1.2 million patients. He left Kaiser in 1999 to pursue independent consulting on waits and delays in health care.
Thomas Nolan, Ph.D., is a statistician, author, and member of Associates in Process Improvement, a group that specializes in the improvement of quality and productivity. Over the past 25 years, he has assisted organizations in many different industries in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). At IHI he has guided the Research and Development function and led several of IHI’s strategic international initiatives such as the Triple Aim. His health care experience includes helping integrated systems, hospitals, and medical practices to accelerate the improvement of quality and the reduction of costs in clinical and administrative services. Dr. Nolan holds a doctorate in statistics from George Washington University and is the author of three books on improving quality and productivity. He has published articles on quality and safety in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Medical Journal. He was the year 2000 recipient of the Deming Medal awarded by the American Society for Quality. In 2010 the Statistics Division of the American Society for Quality awarded him the William Hunter Award for innovative applications of statistical methods.
Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., is a practicing anesthesiologist and critical care physician who is dedicated to finding ways to make hospitals and health care safer for patients. In June 2011, he was named director of the new Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins, as well as Johns Hopkins Medicine’s senior vice president for patient safety and quality. Dr. Pronovost has developed a scientifically proven method for reducing the deadly infections associated with central-line catheters. His simple but effective checklist protocol virtually eliminated these infections across the state of Michigan, saving 1,500 lives and $100 million annually. These results have been sustained for more than 3 years. Moreover, the checklist protocol is now being implemented across the United States, state by state, and in several other countries. The New Yorker magazine says that Dr. Pronovost’s “work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.” Dr. Pronovost has chronicled his work to improve patient safety in his book, Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor’s Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out. In addition, he has written more than 400 articles and chapters related to patient safety and the measurement and evaluation of safety efforts. He serves in an advisory capacity to the World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety. Dr. Pronovost has earned several national awards, including the 2004 John Eisenberg Patient Safety
Research Award and a coveted MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, known popularly as the “genius grant.” He was named by Time magazine as 1 of the world’s 100 “most influential people” for his work in patient safety. He regularly addresses Congress on the importance of patient safety, prompting a report by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform strongly endorsing his intensive care unit infection prevention program. Dr. Pronovost previously headed Johns Hopkins’ Quality and Safety Research Group and was medical director of Hopkins’ Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care. Both groups, as well as other partners throughout the university and health system, have been folded into the Armstrong Institute.
Ronald M. Wyatt, M.D., is the medical director in the Division of Healthcare Improvement at The Joint Commission. In this role, Dr. Wyatt promotes quality improvement and patient safety to internal and external audiences, works to influence public policy and legislation for patient safety improvements, and serves as the lead patient safety information and education resource within The Joint Commission. Dr. Wyatt collaborates in the development of National Patient Safety Goals, and oversees data management and analyses related to the Sentinel Event database. Prior to coming to The Joint Commission, Dr. Wyatt served as the director of the Patient Safety Analysis Center at the Department of Defense (DoD) where he directed and maintained the DoD Patient Safety Registries. These registries house deidentified clinical, root cause analyses, and failure mode and effects analyses data on the DoD’s adverse patient safety events. Previously, Dr. Wyatt was the medical director at several health care organizations where his responsibilities included directing patient safety and quality improvement activities. He also served as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserves and was on active duty in the Internal Medicine Clinic at Reynolds Army Hospital in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. He has received numerous awards, including a U.S. Army Commendation Medal for his service in Desert Storm. Dr. Wyatt served on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Drug Safety Oversight Board, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Science of Public Reporting Special Emphasis Panel, and the Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety Program to Eliminate Health Care–Associated Infections (CUSP) Technical Expert Panel. He is a mentor to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMI) Advisors program at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and a member of the American College of Physicians. Dr. Wyatt is on the faculty at the Institute for Health Care Improvement. He was named 1 of the “Top 50 Patient Safety Experts” in the United States by Becker’s magazine in 2013 and 2014. Areas of special interests include social determinants of health, health disparity, patient activation, and professionalism (disruptive behavior). Dr. Wyatt co-authored the DoD
Patient Activation tool kit. He contributed to the National Patient Safety Goal on Medical Alarm Management, the revised Sentinel Event Policy, and the development and writing of the Patient Safety Systems chapter for The Joint Commission hospital accreditation manual. Dr. Wyatt is an internist with more than 20 years of practice experience and is currently licensed in the state of Alabama. He earned his medical degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and completed residency at the St. Louis University hospital, where he served as the first African-American Chief Resident in the department of Internal Medicine. Dr. Wyatt earned the Executive Master of Science in Health Administration (MSHA) from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In 2000, the Morehouse School of Medicine conferred Dr. Wyatt with an honorary Doctor of Medical Sciences degree. As a George W. Merck Fellow with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in 2009-2010, Dr. Wyatt was trained in performance improvement, measurement, epidemiological, and statistical principles. He also completed a Harvard School of Public Health program in Clinical Effectiveness—a joint program of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Wyatt actively presents on a variety of patient safety topics throughout the United States and Canada. He has written and published numerous articles on patient safety topics.
