Dr. Pronovost is a world-renowned patient safety champion, critical care physician and prolific researcher with more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications. He’s also an innovator whose transformative work leveraging checklists to reduce central line-associated bloodstream infections has saved thousands of lives, reducing infections that once killed as many people as breast or prostate cancer by 80% and earning him recognition as one of Time Magazine‘s 100 most influential people in the world and a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” At University Hospitals, he serves as chief clinical transformation officer and president of the UH Veale Healthcare Transformation Institute, and was named the Veale Distinguished Chair in Leadership and Clinical Transformation in 2023. There, he developed a checklist system to highlight defects in care value and deployed a management and accountability system that reduced annual Medicare patient care costs by 30% over three years while improving quality. This culminated in the system winning the American Hospital Association’s “Quest for Quality” award in 2022. Dr. Pronovost co-chaired the Healthcare Quality Summit alongside the deputy secretary of Health and Human Services in response to the presidential executive order to modernize quality measures across HHS, Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense. He also served on the previous president’s Council for Science and Technology Patient Safety Working Group. Prior, Dr. Pronovost served as Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine’s senior vice president for patient safety and quality, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, and senior vice president for clinical strategy and chief medical officer for UnitedHealthcare. He is a professor in the medicine, nursing and management schools at Case Western Reserve University. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2011, is an advisor to the World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety. He also founded VisICU, since acquired by Philips, and Doctella, acquired by Masimo, among other healthcare technology ventures.
