Dr. Kachalia leads systemwide quality and patient safety strategy for Johns Hopkins Medicine and directs the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, one of the nation’s premier centers for safety research and practice improvement. A practicing hospitalist, he was the first author of a groundbreaking 2010 study demonstrating that transparent responses to patients after errors, including proactive offers of financial resolution, produced liability savings rather than increased costs, a finding that jump-started a national movement to adopt communication and resolution programs and led to the development of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality “CANDOR” toolkit. He played a key role in subsequent studies of communication and resolution program implementation in Massachusetts, and was senior author of a 2024 article in The New England Journal of Medicine titled “Responding to medical errors: Implementing the modern ethical paradigm.” Dr. Kachalia’s organizationwide initiatives have supported Johns Hopkins Hospital’s placement on the U.S. News & World Report “Best Hospitals Honor Roll” and Magnet redesignation across multiple Johns Hopkins system hospitals.
