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.

This piece explores various practical and philosophical issues that could shape the adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence systems in medicine.

Dr. Saria is the John C. Malone Assistant Professor of computer science, statistics, and health policy at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on developing next generation diagnostic, surveillance, and treatment planning tools to reduce adverse events and individualize health care for complex diseases. We spoke with her about artificial intelligence in health care.

This book excerpt describes how integrating innovation and Lean concepts at Virginia Mason enhances clinical performance and the patient experience.

Mr. Graban is an internationally recognized expert in Lean Healthcare. We spoke with him about applying Lean in hospitals to improve safety and decrease waste.

This piece describes the evolution of the World Health Organization's African Partnerships for Patient Safety program and its implications for global patient safety improvement.

This piece describes the emergence of medical care overuse as a patient safety issue and relates efforts to change clinician behaviors to prevent overtreatment.

Dr. Gandhi is President of the National Patient Safety Foundation and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. We spoke with her about NPSF's evolving role in enhancing health care at a national level.

Dr. Smith-Bindman is a national leader in the impact of radiologic testing on patient outcomes, and in the safety of radiographic imaging.

This piece details a number of evidenced-based practices to help detect, prevent, and treat delirium, which is now seen as a patient safety hazard.

A passionate advocate for the importance of the physical exam, Dr. Verghese is a Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and a bestselling author.

This piece, written by a national leader in safe use of medications in elderly patients, discusses strategies for improving the quality and safety of medication use in the nursing home setting.

A Professor at Johns Hopkins University, he coined the term “second victim” to describe the toll that errors take on providers.

Charles Ornstein is a senior reporter at ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization in New York. Formerly with the Los Angeles Times, he co-wrote a series of articles about medical errors at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, which closed in 2007; the series earned the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. He is also the president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. We asked him to speak with us about the role of the media in patient safety. This interview was conducted while he was still at the Times.

Frontline health care providers are challenged by poorly performing work systems. Required equipment is broken, patient medications are in the wrong dose, key information fails to get communicated, and essential supplies are out of stock.(

Workarounds

Most patient interactions with the health care system occur in the outpatient setting. Many potential and actual safety problems occur there as well.(1) Yet patient safety literature and practice do not seem to have reached deeply into ambulatory care.

An engineer and an attorney by training, David Marx, JD, is president of Outcome Engineering, a risk management firm. After a career focused on safety assessment and improvement in aviation, he has spent the last decade focusing on the interface between systems engineering, human factors, and the law. In 2001, he wrote a seminal paper describing the concept of just culture, which became a focal point for efforts to reconcile notions of "no blame" and "accountability." He has gone on to form the "Just Culture Community" to address these issues at health care institutions around the country.

Sorrel King is the mother of Josie King, who died tragically in 2001 at age 18 months because of medical errors during a hospitalization at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She has subsequently become one of the nation’s foremost patient advocates for safety, forming an influential foundation (the Josie King Foundation) and partnering with Johns Hopkins to promote the field of patient safety around the world.