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This piece explores the role medical scribes play in health care, how to implement and evaluate a scribe program, and recommendations to reduce variations in scribe practice.

Dr. Schulz Moore is the Director of Learning and Teaching at the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law and an Associate with the University of New South Wales School of Public Health and Community Medicine. Her research in health law draws from her unique training in public health, law, and health social sciences. We spoke with her about disclosure and apology in health care as well as the intersection between health and legal systems in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

Dr. McDonald is President of the Center for Open and Honest Communication at the MedStar Institute for Quality and Safety, and Adjunct Professor of Law at Loyola University-Chicago School of Law and the Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy. An internationally recognized patient safety expert, he served as a lead architect for the Communication and Optimal Resolution (CANDOR) toolkit, supported by AHRQ. We spoke with him about lessons learned over the years regarding event reporting and his insights about building and disseminating communication-and-resolution programs.

Dr. Schiff is Associate Director of Brigham and Women's Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Quality and Safety Director for the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. He was an invited expert and reviewer for the Improving Diagnosis in Health Care report of the National Academy of Medicine. We spoke with him about understanding and preventing diagnostic errors.

This piece highlights how point-of-care ultrasound can improve and expedite diagnosis and advocates for having an individual responsible for overseeing point-of-care ultrasound use within a health care delivery organization.

Dr. Hoppmann is the Dorothea H. Krebs Endowed Chair of Ultrasound Education, Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Ultrasound Institute of the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. He founded and served as the first President of the Society of Ultrasound in Medical Education. We talked to him about safety and usability of point-of-care ultrasound.

Patient engagement is widely acknowledged as a cornerstone of patient safety. Research in 2018 demonstrates that patient engagement, when done correctly, can help health care systems identify safety hazards, regain trust after they occur, and codesign sustainable solutions.

Patient engagement in safety has evolved from obscurity to maturity over the past two decades. This Annual Perspective highlights emerging approaches to engaging patients and caregivers in safety efforts, including novel technological innovations, and summarizes the existing evidence on the efficacy of such approaches.

A considerable body of evidence demonstrates worsened clinical outcomes for patients admitted to the hospital on weekends compared to those admitted on weekdays. This Annual Perspective summarizes innovative studies published in 2017 that helped clarify the magnitude of this effect and identify possible mechanisms by which it occurs.

This piece explores how strategies from aviation, such as just culture and monitoring technologies, can be applied in health care to improve patient safety.

Dr. Bagian is Director of the Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety at the University of Michigan, and a former astronaut. He co-chaired the team that produced the influential NPSF report entitled, RCA2: Improving Root Cause Analyses and Actions to Prevent Harm.

This piece examines patient safety issues unique to dental care along with strategies to reduce risks.

Dr. Perea-Pérez is Director of the Spanish Observatory for Dental Patient Safety. We spoke with him about patient safety in dentistry.

In this piece, a pharmacist highlights the importance of earning patient safety certification.

The toll of medical errors is often expressed in terms of mortality attributable to patient safety problems. In 2016, there was considerable debate regarding the number of patients who die due to medical errors. This Annual Perspective explores the methodological approaches to estimating mortality attributable to preventable adverse events and discusses the benefits and limitations of existing approaches.

Opioids are known to be high risk medications, and concerns about patient harm from prescription opioid misuse have been increasing in the United States. This Annual Perspective summarizes research published in 2016 that explored the extent of harm from their use, described problematic prescribing practices that likely contribute to adverse events, and demonstrated some promising practices to foster safer opioid use.

This editorial provides an overview of how PSNet and WebM&M have evolved in the past decade.

Ms. Zipperer was a founding staff member of the National Patient Safety Foundation as their information projects manager and has also been Cybrarian for AHRQ Patient Safety Network since its inception. We spoke with her about the role of librarians in patient safety.

Dr. Shojania is Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Quality and Safety and Director of the Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at the University of Toronto. We spoke with him about the evolution of patient safety research over the past 15 years.