CHCE Ethics Experts:

Gerard Magill, Ph.D

Gerard Magill, Ph.D., is a Professor and the Executive Director of the Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University (Health Sciences). Also, he is the Department Chair of the Center’s interdisciplinary PhD program in health care ethics. He has a secondary appointment as Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine (School of Medicine and University Hospital) and a secondary appointment as Professor of Health Administration in the School of Public Health at Saint Louis University. He graduated with a Ph.D. degree from Edinburgh University in 1987. He has published many scholarly essays and several books, including, as editor: Discourse and Context (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993); Personality and Belief (Lanham, NJ: University of America Press, 1994); Values and Public Life, with Marie D. Hoff (Lanham, NJ: University of America Press, 1995); Abortion and Public Policy, with R. Randall Rainey (Omaha, Nebraska: University of Creighton Press, 1996), and Genetics and Ethics. An Interdisciplinary Study (St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis University Press, 2004). He has been awarded over $6 million in grants and funded projects and he is an active member of 14 professional Associations. He has accrued 28 years teaching in graduate education. His research specialties include: the ethics of the human genome and stem cell research, health care ethics in the Catholic tradition, and organizational ethics in health care.

Program Ethics Experts:

Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP

Donald M. Berwick is one of the nation’s leading authorities on health care quality and improvement issues. He is president, CEO and co-founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, MA. He is also clinical professor of pediatrics and health care policy at the Harvard Medical School.

Trained as a pediatrician, Dr. Berwick has served on the staff of Children’s Hospital in Boston since 1976. In the mid-1980’s, as Vice President for Quality-of-Care Measurement at the Harvard Community Health Plan, Dr. Berwick became increasingly interested in applying and adapting for medical care the approaches to breakthrough quality improvement that were being developed in industry since mid-century. From 1987 to 1991, Dr. Berwick was co-founder and co-principal investigator of the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Health Care (NDP). Building on the progress that had been made at NDP, he and his colleagues founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement as a freestanding, non-profit organization in 1991.

From 1990 through 1996, Dr. Berwick was vice chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and from 1996 to 1999, he participated as the first "Independent Member" of the Board of Trustees of the American Hospital Association. An elected member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), Dr. Berwick now serves on the IOM’s governing Council. From 1998 through 2001, he served on the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, for the last two years as its chair. He is past-president of the International Society for Medical Decision Making.

Dr. Berwick served on President Clinton’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Healthcare Industry. Co-chaired by the secretaries of health and human services and labor, the Commission was charged with developing a broader understanding of issues facing the rapidly evolving healthcare delivery system and building consensus on ways to assure and improve the quality of health care.

Dr. Berwick has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the 1999 Ernest A. Codman Award, and, in 2001, the first Alfred I. DuPont Award for excellence in children’s health care from Nemours, one of the nation’s largest pediatric health care provider organizations. In 2002, he was given the "Award of Honor" from the American Hospital Association for outstanding leadership in improving health care quality.

A member of several editorial boards, including The British Medical Journal, Dr. Berwick has published more than 120 scientific articles in numerous professional journals on health care policy, decision analysis, technology assessment, and health care quality management. His research and commentaries have appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The British Medical Journal and other scientific journals. Books he has co-authored include Curing Health Care and New Rules: Regulation, Markets and the Quality of American Health Care.

Dr. Berwick is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College and holds an MD degree cum laude from the Harvard Medical School and a Masters of Public Policy degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Troyen A. Brennan

Troyen A. Brennan is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and President of the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization. He is also Professor of Law and Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Brennan received law, medicine and public health degrees from Yale University, and he trained in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dr. Brennan’s research interests concern legal and ethical issues in medicine and public health. He has written over 200 peer reviewed articles and four books. Elected as a member of the ABIM Board of Directors in 1999, Dr. Brennan serves on the Committee on Recertification and the Committee on General Internal Medicine and chairs the ABIM Foundation/ACP-ASIM Foundation/European Society for Internal Medicine Medical Professionalism Project 2000.

Janet M. Corrigan, Ph.D.

Janet M. Corrigan, Ph.D. is Senior Board Director for Health Care Services at the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which is responsible for projects relating to health care quality, safety, insurance and benefits coverage, organization and financing. She also served as the study director of the Quality of Health Care in America project, which produced the reports: To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.

Prior to joining IOM, Dr. Corrigan was the Executive Director of the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry, a one-year commission responsible for producing the Consumer Bill of Rights and Responsibilities and a comprehensive report on the quality of health care. Dr. Corrigan serves on the boards of the Baldrige Board of Overseers and the National Center for Healthcare Leadership. She received her doctorate in health services research and masters degree in industrial engineering from the University of Michigan, and masters degrees in business and public health from the University of Rochester.

Rosemary Gibson

Rosemary Gibson is the author of Wall of Silence, a book of narratives about patient and clinician experiences of medical error that puts a human face on the Institute of Medicine report, To Err is Human. The book has been reviewed in the Journal of the American Medical Association and Health Affairs, referenced in proceedings of the U.S. Senate, mentioned in Congressional testimony, noted in The Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe, and will be highlighted in the January 2005 issue of O Magazine.

Gibson has given keynote presentations at the National Quality Forum, the annual patient safety conference hosted by JCAHO, The Federation of State Medical Boards annual meeting, the National Association of Health Care Quality, the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, the College of William and Mary, Tenet Health Care Quality Management Leadership, the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education, and the Dartmouth Clinical Microsystem Symposium. She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Michigan Graduate School of Health Administration and Georgetown University. In November 2004, Gibson will be conducting a seminar on disclosure for the test development committee of the National Board of Medical Examiners.

Earlier in her career, Gibson served as Senior Research Associate at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy organization; as Vice President of the Economic and Social Research Institute, a policy think tank; and as consultant to the Medical College of Virginia and the Virginia state legislature's Commission on Health Care. She also served as a volunteer and Board member at a free medical clinic in Washington, D.C. Current interests include social and economic development in poor countries and leprosy eradication in India.

She is a graduate of Georgetown University and has a masters degree from The London School of Economics.

Lucian L. Leape, MD

Lucian Leape is an Adjunct Professor of Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard in 1988, he was Professor of Surgery and Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine and the New England Medical Center. Dr. Leape is internationally recognized as a leader of the patient safety movement, starting with the publication in JAMA of his seminal article, Error in Medicine, in 1994. His subsequent research demonstrated the success of the application of systems theory to the prevention of adverse drug events. In addition, he has directed research into overuse and underuse of cardiovascular procedures. He has published over 100 papers on patient safety and quality of care.

He has been an outspoken advocate of the nonpunitive systems approach to the prevention of medical errors and he has talked and written widely about the need to make patient safety a national priority. He has testified many times before Congress and served on numerous public and private organizational boards and committees. Dr. Leape was one of the founders of the National Patient Safety Foundation, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Error, and the Harvard Kennedy School Executive Session on Medical Error. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Quality of Care in America Committee, which published "To Err is Human" in 1999 and "Crossing the Quality Chasm" in 2001.

Recent honors include the Distinguished Service Award of the American Pediatric Surgical Association, the Donabedian Award from the American Public Health Association, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator’s Award in Health Policy Research, and honorary fellowship in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. He has been honored with leadership awards from the American Society of Healthsystems Pharmacists, the American Pharmaceutical Association, and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. In 2003 he received the duPont Award for Excellence in Children’s Health Care. In 2004, he received the John Eisenberg Patient Safety Award from the JCAHO and National Quality Forum, and Modern Healthcare named him as one of the 100 most powerful people in health care.

Dr Leape is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Medical School. He trained in surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in pediatric surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Dennis S. O’Leary, M.D.
President
Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations

Dennis S. O’Leary, M.D., is president of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. Under his leadership, the Joint Commission has successfully modernized its accreditation process to focus on the actual performance of individual health care organizations and to emphasize the use of measurement to drive continuous improvement in organization performance. In recent years, he has led the introduction of cutting-edge standards relating to patient safety, pain management, use of patient restraints, and emergency preparedness and management.

During Dr. O’Leary’s 18-year tenure as its president, the Joint Commission has expanded its programmatic purview to encompass the mainstream of the U.S. health care delivery system. Beyond its original hospital base, the Joint Commission accredits managed care plans and a full range of ambulatory, behavioral health, home care, laboratory, and long term care services. Its growing business portfolio now also includes international accreditation and consultation services. The Joint Commission launched its Disease-Specific Care Certification program in 2002. This progressive growth has led to a quadrupling of the Joint Commission’s budget and staff since 1986.

Prior to joining the Joint Commission, Dr. O’Leary served as dean for Clinical Affairs at the George Washington University Medical Center and vice president of the George Washington University Health Plan, an academic HMO. During his 15-year tenure at George Washington, he achieved the faculty rank of professor of medicine and served for more than a decade as medical director of the university’s hospital.

Dr. O’Leary is highly active in a variety of professional activities. He earlier served as president and chairman of the board of the District of Columbia Medical Society, and was a founding member of the National Capital Area Health Care Coalition. Since coming to the Joint Commission, he has become a Master of the American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine; an initial Fellow of the American College of Physician Executives; an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives; an honorary member of the American Dental Association; and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. O’Leary is currently a non-voting liaison member of the board of directors of the National Quality Forum and a member of the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research. He was recently identified by Modern Healthcare as "one of the 25 most influential leaders in health care" during the past quarter century.

Dr. O’Leary earned his Medical Degree from Cornell University and his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College. After two years of internal medicine training at the University of Minnesota Hospital, he completed his residency and hematology fellowship at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Hematology.