Inbound Blog

Microsoft has been working on health-related initiatives for years, but is now bringing its efforts together into a new Microsoft Healthcare team.  It’s a bigger effort to create cloud-based patient profiles, push doctors to the cloud, and eventually have artificial intelligence analyzing data. The software maker has hired two industry …

Army Lieutenant Colonel and Emergency Physician, Drew Morgan, will be one of two American astronauts heading to the International Space Station next year. He will launch aboard a Russian Soyuz 59S rocket and spacecraft in July 2019 as a member of Expedition 60/61. Morgan, who has ties to various Fort …

Artificial intelligence and robotic surgeries are the future of health care. These technologies can automate new tasks, and we are making more of them, faster, better, and cheaper than ever before. At present, about 4000 surgical robots are in current use, mostly using a patented system that has been approved …

This post was contributed by Jennifer Hanscom, CEO of the Washington State Medical Association and a board member of the Physicians Foundation. In these unsettled times, smart, compassionate and innovative leaders are needed more than ever. With today’s challenges in the house of medicine, the shifting landscape of healthcare and …

This article written by Scientific America believes that in many cases empathy and warmth does in fact make a Physician seem more competent. Imagine you’ve been experiencing a mysterious pain and you go to your doctor for testing. Understandably, you feel nervous when you go in to hear the results. …

Most doctors would love to have a clone of themselves to help with their patient workload. You might think that Dr. Elana McDonald got that wish but, it’s actually her twin sister Dr. Delana Wardlaw! These identical twins made it their life goal to improve people’s health. The sisters didn’t decide to …

I had the good fortune to speak at the March for Science in Boston over the weekend. The speakers were a diverse bunch, more so than what is reflected in the scientific workforce in the United States at large. That’s a problem for science and medicine. In my work as a female …

Pediatric cardiologists at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford are taking inspiration from the video game and consumer technology industries to leverage virtual reality (VR) as a vital tool for providers and patients alike. The Virtual Reality Program at the Children’s Heart Center is going beyond gaming with three VR projects …

Family medicine faculty is more diverse than other faculties, but women and minorities still hold a smaller proportion of full professor positions, according to a study published in the January-February issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Researchers from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) …

When Laurence Wellikson, CEO of the Society of Hospital Medicine, first started guest lecturing in health care management classes at the University of Pennsylvania a decade or so ago, he needed to explain to students what a “hospitalist” is. But then the ranks of hospitalists, defined as physicians who work …

When a patient goes to the best hospital, he or she usually hopes for a doctor who is knowledgeable and experienced. Something else to wish for? A woman physician.That's because female doctors may on average be better than their male counte...

New program aims to prevent 440,000 yearly deaths due to medical errors.
Why do physicians accidentally jab themselves in the hand with an EpiPen (epinephrine injection) when they are trying to give another person an injection while holding their breath?

How does directing a “Martian” to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich improve healthcare communications?

The answers are part of the curriculum for the first PhD in healthcare quality and patient safety program in the country — at Northwestern Medicine — which aims to prevent the annual 440,000 deaths from medical errors in the United States.

“You can’t stress enough how crazy it is that the third–leading cause of death is medical errors,” said Donna Woods, PhD, director of the graduate programs in healthcare quality and patient safety at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “How will this ever get fixed if we don’t train a work force to do it? We need an army of experts who need to know how to address this. The medical field does not have the skills to do it.”

The first PhD student in healthcare quality and patient safety graduated this fall with others in the pipeline.

Senior and mid–career clinicians (physicians, nurses, pharmacists) and healthcare professionals are trained by engineers, cognitive psychologists and risk assessment and change management specialists, who bring a critical fresh eye to the medical world. The “outsiders” teach students how to spot the vulnerable kinks in the system and figure out how to fix them. The students learn to do research, so they can design fixes based on scientific evidence.

To build a national healthcare safety army, Northwestern has provided a template from its master’s level healthcare quality and patient safety program – also the first in the country — to other medical schools to launch their own master’s programs. These include George Washington University, Thomas Jefferson University’s College of Population Health, University of Illinois and Cornell University.

The PhD students learn about physical and cognitive ergonomics, which is the study of predictable errors your mind can make and how to consider these in healthcare design to make the delivery of healthcare more reliable.