2024 Congress Keynotes

From “Still Not Safe” to Safety Ready: The Path for Radical Transformation of Safety 

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Donald M. Berwick MD, MPP, FRCP, KBE, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), is one of the leading scholars, teachers, and advocates in the world for the continual improvement of health care systems. He is a pediatrician, and a longstanding member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He founded and led the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, now the leading global nonprofit organization in its field. He was appointed by President Obama as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he served in 2010 and 2011. He has counseled governments, clinical leaders, and executives in dozens of nations. He is an elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Philosophical Society. He has received numerous awards, including the Heinz Award for Public Policy, the Award of Honor of the American Hospital Association, and the Gustav Leinhard Award from the Institute of Medicine. For his work with the British National Health Service, in 2005 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed him Honourary Knight Commander of the British Empire, the highest honor awarded by the UK to a non-British subject.  

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Kedar Mate, MD, is the President and Chief Executive Officer at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and a member of the faculty at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Mate’s scholarly work has focused on health care quality, strategies for achieving large-scale change, and approaches to improving health equity and value. Previously Dr. Mate worked at Partners In Health, the World Health Organization, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and served as IHI’s Chief Innovation and Education Officer.  Dr. Mate is widely published, serves on multiple health system and health care technology boards, and has received multiple honors including serving as a Soros Fellow, a Fulbright Specialist, and an Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellow. He graduated from Brown University with a degree in American History and from Harvard Medical School with a medical degree. You can follow him on Twitter at @KedarMate.     

The Lucian Leape Institute Presents: Hope, Hype, and Perils of AI: What does it Mean for Safety? 

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Dr. Kaveh Shojania is Professor and Vice Chair (Quality & Innovation) in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto.  Dr. Shojania’s research has focused on identifying effective strategies for improving healthcare quality. He has published approximately 200 papers indexed in Medline, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and the Lancet. Google Scholar lists over 20,000 citations to his work. In addition to his own research, Dr Shojania helped shape publishing related to healthcare quality though his work as Editor-in-Chief at BMJ Quality & Safety. During his tenure (2011-2020), the journal’s impact factor rose to consistently rank in the top few spots among the 90+ journals in its category, including health care quality and safety as well as health services research, clinical informatics, health policy, and medical education.  In 2023, Dr. Shojania worked with staff at IHI on a rapid review of applications of artificial intelligence to healthcare delivery. This work continues as part of an expert working group Dr Shojania is co-chairing for the Lucian Leape Institute assessing the patient safety opportunities and risks associated with the implementation of Generative Artificial Intelligence applications in healthcare.

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Beth Daley Ullem, MBA, is a nationally recognized governance expert and activist for safety and quality in health care. Beth works with health system leadership teams, boards, and industry leaders to advance the quality and safety of patient care. Beth was the project lead and lead author for the IHI White Paper Framework for Effective Governance of Health System Quality. She contributed to the governance guidelines for the HHS National Action Plan to Advance Patient Safety and on other health care metric development efforts. Beth is also a co-founder of Patients for Patient Safety US, a patient advocacy organization where she co-leads the public policy and AI safety efforts. Beth serves on the board of IHI and formerly served on the boards of Solutions for Patient Safety (SPS), a 100+-hospital pediatric safety network, the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM), and the Center for Healthcare Value (now Catalysis). Beth left her career as a consultant with McKinsey to advance her passion of safety driven by the loss of her son to a medical error in 2003.  

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Nasim Afsar, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Health Officer at Oracle Health, is relentlessly focused on advancing the health and care of the world, through Healthy People, Healthy Workforce, and Healthy Business. She leads Product Strategy, Global Market Strategy & Entry, and Third-Party Partnerships. Last year, her team delivered higher quality of care for over 2 million people (Healthy People), saved physicians and nurses nearly 200,000 hours (Healthy Workforce) and positively impacted the financial performance of clients (Healthy Business). She leads Oracle Health’s Steering Committees on AI/ML in Healthcare, Retail in Healthcare and Payers. Her team has a focus on health equity, working closely with key stakeholders globally. She also works on building the larger ecosystem of health care, including working closely with payers, retail, pharma, food and beverage and public health agencies. Dr. Afsar previously served as Chief Operating Officer, University of California, Irvine (UCI), leading inpatient and ambulatory operations, emergency services, building and construction, and police services. She also led health system contracting and was the executive for population health management. Previously at University of California, Los Angeles Health, Dr. Afsar served as Associate Chief Medical Officer leading large-scale health system initiatives and as Chief Quality Officer for the Department of Medicine, overseeing population health initiatives.

Keeping Well-Being Relevant and your Workforce Safe While the Waves Keep Crashing

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Tim Cunningham, RN, is former Co-Chief Well-Being Officer at Emory Healthcare and the Woodruff Health Sciences Center at Emory University and is faculty at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory. He collaborates with interprofessional teams to support structural and systemic well-being change for healthcare teams and professionals, university staff and faculty, researchers, learners, and community members. His clinical background is emergency nursing and his publications discuss ways as to how we can practice compassion in the most challenging of settings. Cunningham’s first passion was in the performing arts—theater, clown, dance and acrobatics. He worked as an actor for nearly a decade in various regional theaters in the US and internationally. It was because of those experiences he began work with Clowns Without Borders in 2003. A small non-profit organization, Clowns Without Borders sends professional artists into war zones, refugee camps and other zones of crisis with the simple mission of catalyzing laughter and playfulness. Cunningham has performed in more than 20 countries with the clowns, he has served as Executive Director of Clowns Without Borders and now serves as Board President.  It was working in a pediatric ward in pre-earthquake Haiti that inspired Cunningham to study nursing. He graduated from the University of Virginia School of Nursing in 2009 and then worked as an emergency/trauma nurse at the UVA Health, Children’s National Medical Center and New York Presbyterian, Cornell. Cunningham completed his Doctorate of Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University in 2016. 

2024 Spotlight Sessions

Get full details on our Spotlight sessions on the Congress Agenda page.

SP01: Reigniting Safety: National and System-Level Transformation