Patient Safety Executive Development Program

IHI’s Patient Safety Executive Program offers unique access to valuable planning support, including an in-person session with additional opportunities for participants to collaborate and learn from real-world experiences with fellow attendees.

Over the course of 7 weeks and 8 sessions (7 virtual, 1 in-person), participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of how to assess their organization's culture of safety, design strategic plans, develop continuous learning systems, and implement changes to improve safety.

The Patient Safety Executive Program provides tangible benefits and outcomes that will strengthen participants' ability to:

Assess your organization and/or area of responsibility’s culture of safety

• Use diagnostic tools to measure how a health system or organization integrates teamwork, negotiation, transparency, reliability, and continuous learning for safety.

• Identify the most relevant data for measuring a culture of safety and determine additional data that should be captured. 

Design a strategic patient safety plan tailored to your area of responsibility

• Develop new systems for continuous learning, including learning from what works and what can be improved upon.

• Construct safety systems that accommodate human factors and team resource management to reduce harm, errors, and patient mortality within the health system. 

Implement evidence-based methodologies for system-wide improvement, tailored to the organization or the attendee’s area of responsibility, toward building a sustainable and reliable culture of safety

• Generate buy-in from healthcare executives, senior leaders, or board-level leaders to help develop a strategic patient safety plan.

• Apply a sustainable, systemic culture of safety — not just a collection of stand-alone safety improvement projects — to your organization/area of responsibility. 

IHI is committed to keeping our programs up to date and aligned with the latest advancements in health care and professional development. This year, we are pleased  
to announce important additions to our Patient Safety Executive Program, each strategically designed to enhance and strengthen participants’ knowledge and capabilities in advancing patient safety. 

Updates to the Patient Safety Executive Program for 2025 empower participants to:

• Gain knowledge in healthcare governance with a new session on “Building Governance and Processes for Improvement in Patient Safety.”

• Engage with newly integrated content based on the National Action Plan to Advance Patient Safety.

• Personally interact with experienced faculty, and attend flexible, virtual sessions aimed at reducing cognitive overload while maximizing learning. 

Lead Faculty

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Frank Federico, Former Vice President and Senior Safety Expert, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), works in the areas of patient safety and the application of reliability principles in health care. He is faculty for the IHI Patient Safety Executive Development Program and has co-chaired a number of Patient Safety Collaboratives. Mr. Federico has authored numerous patient safety articles, co-authored a book chapter in Achieving Safe and Reliable Healthcare: Strategies and Solutions, and is an Executive Producer of "First, Do No Harm, Part 2: Taking the Lead." He coaches leaders and teams, and lectures extensively, nationally and internationally, on patient safety.

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Jessica Behrhorst, MPH, CPPS, CPQH, CPHRM, Quality, Safety and HRO Consultant, Aptive Resources, works in the areas of patient safety, workforce safety, and high reliability. She is faculty for the IHI Patient Safety Executive Development Program and on Redesigning Event Review with Root Cause Analysis and Action (RCA2). Prior to Joining Aptive Resources she served as the Senior Director at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). She has also served as the Assistant Vice President of Quality & Patient Safety at Ochsner Health System where she helped set the strategic priorities in quality and patient safety and oversaw various projects involving patient safety, performance improvement, regulatory readiness, ambulatory nursing, and quality outcomes. She has presented her work on RCA2 and Improving the Culture of Safety at various regional and national meetings. She has also worked on research projects involving reduction in Sepsis mortality and access to healthcare for underserved populations. Jessica received her bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and her Master of Public Health Degree from the Louisiana State University School of Public Health. She is a Certified Professional in Patient Safety (CPPS), a Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) and a Certified Professional in Healthcare Risk Management (CPHRM).

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Lauge Sokol-Hessner, MD, CPPS, is a practicing clinician, educator, researcher, innovator, and leader in patient safety & quality improvement. He’s an Associate Professor of Medicine and an attending hospitalist at the University of Washington (UW) & Harborview Medical Centers, and a Quality Improvement Mentor at the UW Medicine Center for Scholarship in Patient Care Quality and Safety.  As the Associate Director for the UW Collaborative for Accountability and Improvement and a Faculty Coach for the PACT Collaborative, he helps lead national work to sustain and spread more proactive, ethical, person-centered responses after harm events.  He has operational quality & safety experience as a former Senior Medical Director of Patient Safety at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.  As IHI Faculty, and as a former quality and safety fellowship program director and masters program course director at Harvard Medical School, he's passionate about helping develop the next generation of leaders in quality and safety, and he regularly teaches about patient safety, quality improvement, and leadership.  He completed his medical degree and internal medicine residency at the University of Pennsylvania.

Guest Presenters

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Carolyn L. Candiello joined GBMC HealthCare in October 2010 as Vice President for Quality and Patient Safety and serves as a member of the organization's Executive Team. A veteran of more than two decades in the healthcare industry, nearly half of that time spent in the quality, safety and patient satisfaction arena, Candiello has broad experience in performance improvement, risk management, medical staff services, patient safety and regulatory affairs. She has responsibility for leading the continuous improvement process of quality of care for patients across the GBMC HealthCare system and providing oversight for compliance and interactions with clinical regulatory agencies such as the Joint Commission and the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Candiello served on the Board of Examiners for the National Baldridge Performance Excellence Program. Immediately prior to joining GBMC, Candiello served as the Director, Quality and Patient Safety at Holy Family Hospital, a 271-bed acute care hospital located in Methuen, Mass. She has also held quality and safety positions with a small not-for-profit system and with the University of Massachusetts healthcare system. Candiello earned a bachelor's degree in business administration and leadership from Fitchburg State College, earning summa cum laude honors. She also holds a Masters Degree in Leadership and Management from Notre Dame of Maryland University.
 

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Moshe Cohen, MBA, Mediator and corporate trainer in private practice, as well as Senior Lecturer with Boston University, has been teaching, mediating, coaching, writing, and speaking on the topics of negotiation, leadership, change management, influence, conflict resolution, mediation, facilitation, and communication since 1995. Mr. Cohen founded The Negotiating Table, Inc. and has worked with many companies and organizations in the Boston area, as well as nationally and internationally. He teaches negotiation and leadership in the MBA and MSMS programs at Boston University where he has been teaching since 2000. As a mediator, Mr. Cohen specializes in employment, workplace, and discrimination-related disputes. Mr. Cohen has a background in Physics from Cornell University, a Masters in Electrical Engineering from McGill University and later received an MBA from Boston University.

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Richard D. Guthrie, Jr., M.D., C.P.E. is the System Chief Quality Officer.  As the Chief Quality Officer, Guthrie oversees the development and implementation of strategies and programs aimed at improving patient safety and quality for the health system. Dr. Guthrie previously served as the Regional Medical Director – New Orleans from 1999-2014. As Medical Director, Guthrie oversaw the physician group and was responsible for physician recruitment, clinical program development and professional affairs. Dr. Guthrie earned his 
Bachelor of Science degree from the University of New Orleans, summa cum laude, and graduated from Louisiana State University Medical School, Alpha Omega Alpha, in 1986. Dr. Guthrie received his internal medicine training, including residency and chief residency, at Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation.

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Dr. David Munch has been an IHI faculty member for many years teaching in the Patient Safety Executive (PSE) program, Leading Quality Improvement, Engaging Managers in Quality (LQI) program, numerous IHI National Forums and many international IHI patient safety programs. In addition, he has helped numerous health systems over the past 12 years with their Lean quality improvement implementations.  During that time, he has been an instructor for the Belmont University Lean Healthcare Certificate program and prior to that, the University of Michigan Lean Certificate program, focusing on leadership and management systems development.  He served as the COO, CQO and CMO from 2000 to 2009 at Exempla Lutheran Medical Center. He has an extensive background in health system operations and clinical practice and currently sits on The Quality Committee of the Board for The Children's Hospital of Colorado.

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Lara Musser, DO, is the Deputy Chief Quality Officer at Jacobi and North Central Bronx Hospital, and a practicing Emergency Medicine Physician. She completed her residency at Metropolitan/Harlem Hospital in New York City, and completed the New York City Health + Hospitals Clinical Leadership Fellowship in the Office of Quality & Safety. She is dedicated to improving systemic issues facing our current health care system.
 

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Jo Shapiro, MD, FACS, is an associate professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School. She is Senior Faculty for the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston and a Consultant for the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Anesthesia, Pain and Critical Care. In 2008, she founded the Brigham and Women's Hospital Center for Professionalism and Peer Support where she served as the director for over 10 years. During that time the Center became a model for national and international institutions seeking methods to enhance a culture of trust and respect and improve clinician wellbeing. She continues to educate and assist organizations in developing specific programmatic and educational approaches such as peer support, professionalism initiatives, and wellbeing programs. She served as chair of the Ethics and Professionalism Committee of the American Board of Medical Specialties and has held multiple educational leadership roles including: senior associate director of Graduate Medical Education for Partners HealthCare, founding scholar of the Academy at Harvard Medical School, and president of the Society of University Otolaryngologists. She was one of BWH's first woman division chiefs. She serves on the faculty of the Harvard Leadership Development for Physicians and Scientists. She was a faculty member of the Department of Surgery at BWH for over 35 years; her surgical expertise was in treating adults with oropharyngeal dysphagia. She was named as a finalist for the Schwartz Center Compassionate Caregiver Award. In 2019, Harvard Medical School gave her the Shirley Driscoll Dean's Award for the Enhancement of Women's Careers.

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Dr. Ronald Wyatt, Vice President and Patient Safety Officer, joined MCIC Vermont in 2020 as Vice President and Patient Safety Officer. He is nationally recognized in the United States as an expert in patient safety, and several times has been named by Becker's as one of the "Top 50 Patient Safety Experts" in the US. Ron currently serves as co-chair of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Equity Advisory Group. He presents nationally and internationally on leadership, safety culture, safety event analysis, human factors in health care, patient experience, and health equity. He is also a member of the ACGME Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) committee and serves on several boards, including the IHI Certified Professional in Patient Safety and the Society to Prevent Diagnostic Error. He is a credentialed course instructor in the School of Health Professions at the University of Alabama Birmingham. Ron was the first Patient Safety Officer at the Joint Commission. In 2010, Ron was appointed Director of the Patient Safety Analysis Center in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), now the Defense Health Agency. Most recently, he was Chief Quality and Patient Safety Officer at Cook County Health. Ron is a graduate of the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Medicine and holds an executive master's degree in health administration from the University of Alabama Birmingham. He was a 2009-2010 Merck Fellow at IHI.