AHRQ Patient Safety Network

Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor's Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out. Classic icon

Pronovost P, Vohr E. New York, NY: Hudson Street Press; 2010. ISBN: 9781594630644.

Over the past decade, Johns Hopkins intensivist Dr. Peter Pronovost has emerged as the world's most influential patient safety researcher. In this book, written with Eric Vohr, Pronovost describes how his work was inspired by two deaths from medical mistakes: of young Josie King at Johns Hopkins Hospital (chronicled by her mother Sorrel in another book) and of his own father. The meat of the volume is a detailed chronicle of Pronovost's journey from neophyte faculty member to internationally acclaimed researcher and change agent. In earnest and plainspoken prose, he describes the inside story of interventions and studies that have transformed the safety world: the Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety Program (CUSP), the use of ICU goal cards, and most importantly, the use of checklists to reduce central line infections in more than 100 Michigan ICUs, a story also recently described by Dr. Atul Gawande in The Checklist Manifesto. Dr. Pronovost was the subject of an AHRQ WebM&M interview in 2005.

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