| Gordon D. Schiff, MD
Dr. Schiff is a general internist who joined the Brigham and Women's Hospital's Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care in 2007 as a clinician researcher in the area of patient safety and medical informatics and Associate Director of the Brigham Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice. He is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Previously he worked at Chicago's Cook County Hospital for more than 3 decades where he directed the General Medicine Clinic and Chaired the institution's Quality Assurance/Quality Improvement, and P&T (Formulary) Committees, and was Professor
of Medicine at Rush Medical College.
Currently he is the Clinical and Research Director of the 3-year AHRQ-funded Massachusetts statewide malpractice and patient safety improvement initiative—the PROMISES project (Proactive Reduction in Outpatient Malpractice: Improving Safety Efficiency and Satisfaction). He also works with CRICO Harvard Risk Management Foundation as chair of the CRICO Ambulatory Risk Management Leaders Group. Dr. Schiff is the Medical Director of the Center for Research in Therapeutics CERT TOP-MED project (Tools for Optimizing Prescribing, Monitoring and Education related to medication usage) based at University of Illinois College of Pharmacy in Chicago. He was awarded a grant by the National Patient Safety Foundation to study 100,000 CPOE-related medication errors reported to the USP MEDMARX. He was past Chair of USP's Consumer Interest panel that oversaw the Consumer Reports drug information for patients book. He is a
co-investigator in a Commonwealth Fund sponsored evaluation of an innovative primary care medical
home project in Massachusetts and New York.
Dr. Schiff was editor of special issue of Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety devoted to the safety and reliability of the handling of critical lab and radiology results, expanded into a book published by Joint Commission Resources, Getting Results: Reliably Communicating and Acting on Critical Test Results. He is author of the section on Diagnostic Error in the WHO monograph Current Issues in Patient Safety: A Global Perspective prepared by The Committee on Research Priorities World Alliance for Patient Safety / World Health Organization. He is co-chair of the international Diagnostic Error in Medicine Conferences held in 2009 and 2010 in conjunction with the Society for Medical Decision-making.
He is a member of the editorial boards of Medical Care, the Journal of Public Health Policy, and the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety and author of numerous articles on patient safety, diagnosis error, and medication quality improvement. He is past Chair of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA), recipient of the 2005 Institute of Medicine Chicago (IOMC) Patient Safety Leader of the Year award, and the Institute for Safe Medical Practices (ISMP) 2006 Lifetime Achievement award. In 2006 he was selected by Modern Healthcare as one of the “30 People for the Future”- national leaders most “likely to continue to shape health care in the years and decades ahead.”
