Eisenberg patient safety award winners announced

A patient safety pioneer, a leading adviser to a health care purchaser group, two physician authors, a U.S. Army major and a suburban Pittsburgh hospital were the winners of the 2004 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards sponsored by the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

Lucian Leape, MD, one of the authors of the Institute of Medicine's "To Err is Human" report and adjunct professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, was given the individual achievement award for his "fundamental conceptual contributions to contemporary understanding" of medical errors and his "tireless efforts to improve the safety of care for all patients."

Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an adviser to The Leapfrog Group coalition of employers and purchasers of health care services, was given the research achievement award for his "creative initiatives that have led to dramatic improvements in safety and quality of care in intensive care units."

There were two awards for innovation. The first went to University of California San Francisco-based physicians, Kaveh G. Shojania, MD, and Robert M. Wachter, MD, for their book on medical errors, Internal Bleeding. They were recognized for their creation of case-based patient safety educational materials.

Major Danny Jaghab of Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio was recognized for his distance learning program on sentinel events, root-cause analysis and risk-cutting ideas.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-McKeesport was given the award for innovation at the local or organizational level for its development of personalized self-learning packets, which have shown effectiveness in reducing infections and falls.

Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2004/09/27/prbf0927.htm.