Dr. Skochelak is the Group Vice President for Medical Education at the American Medical Association (AMA). She leads the AMA's Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative, which aims to align physician training with the changing needs of our health care system. We spoke with her about her experience in medical education.

Dr. Drew is the David Mortara Distinguished Professor of Physiological Nursing and Clinical Professor of Medicine in Cardiology at the University of California, San Francisco. We spoke with her about the perils and prevalence of alert fatigue.

Workarounds

Eric G. Poon, MD, MPH, is Director of Clinical Informatics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Poon’s research has focused on using health information technology to improve patient safety. He oversees the development and implementation of clinical applications including computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and barcode-assisted electronic medication administration record, and was lead author on the first rigorous study demonstrating the impact of a bar coding system in a hospital pharmacy. We asked him to speak with us about how such technology can augment medication safety.

Lucian Leape, MD, is generally known as the father of the modern patient safety movement in the United States. A Harvard professor, Leape shifted his career two decades ago from his clinical practice as a pediatric surgeon to a focus on understanding how medical errors occur and how patient safety can be improved. The result was several groundbreaking studies and commentaries that helped shift the paradigm from "bad people" to "bad systems," and which paved the way for the Institute of Medicine report, "To Err is Human," which he helped write. He has received dozens of honors, including the John M. Eisenberg patient safety award, the duPont Award for Excellence in Children's Health Care, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator's Award in Health Policy Research. He spoke to us about his remarkable career and his thoughts about the patient safety movement.