Patient Safety Awareness Week Webinar: Diagnostic Scope: Implications for AI, Clinicians, and Patients

Sigall Bell, MD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She leads the OpenNotes Patient Safety Initiative, a multi-site study examining the relationship between OpenNotes and safety outcomes. With her collaborators, she developed a patient reporting tool linked to OpenNotes, among the first in the country to solicit patient feedback on notes to improve safety and quality. She also leads educational innovations, such as including patients and family voices in medical education through feedback on notes. Bell also serves as Director of Patient Safety and Quality Initiatives at the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice (IPEP), Boston Children’s Hospital, where she is part of a team that has trained more than 900 inter-professional clinician-leaders in medical error disclosure nationally. She has participated in several Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) liability reform grants focused on national Communication and Resolution Programs and involving patients in post-adverse event learning. As a recipient of the Arnold P. Gold Professorship, Sigall’s research probes the effects of organizational culture and the “hidden curriculum” – the customs that shape communication and moral decision-making in the clinical learning environment – on patient safety. With her collaborators, she has helped develop a “speaking up scale” to enhance safety culture metrics and a new educational paradigm for “Patients as Teachers” in inter-professional training sessions on medical error disclosure and prevention. Bell has received several teaching awards and is a member of Academy of Medical Education at Harvard Medical School.

Gary Weissman, MD, MSHP, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Informatics, pulmonary and critical care physician, and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. His lab is focused on building and testing predictive clinical decision support systems in both inpatient and outpatient settings, and to studying policies that provide oversight and governance for such systems. His methodologic focus includes statistical learning methods, natural language processing, and social network analysis. He is committed to creating open-source predictive systems that are safe, effective, and equitable.

Laura Zwaan, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Medical Education Research Rotterdam (iMERR) of the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Dr. Zwaan has a background in cognitive psychology and epidemiology and obtained a PhD degree from the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam. Zwaan is fascinated by how clinicians make complex decisions under uncertainty. Her research focuses on the clinical reasoning process and the cognitive causes of diagnostic errors. Zwaan received several grants and awards for her research, including prestigious personal VENI grant from the Netherlands Scientific Organization. Zwaan initiated the European Diagnostic Error in Medicine conferences and was the main organizer and chair of the 1st European conference in Rotterdam in 2016 and the co-chair for the conference in Bern, Switzerland (2018). Zwaan is an active member of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) and has been on the scientific committee for the Diagnostic Error in Medicine conferences for 8 years (2011-2018) and she served as the chair of the SIDM research committee (2015-2017).