Peter J. Pronovost

Peter J. Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., F.C.C.M., is a world-renowned patient safety champion, innovator, critical care physician, a prolific researcher (publishing over 800 peer review publications), entrepreneur (founding a health care start-up that was acquired), and a global thought leader, informing US and global health policy. His scientific work leveraging checklists to reduce catheter-related bloodstream infections has saved thousands of lives and earned him high-profile accolades, including being named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, receiving a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2008.

As Chief Quality & Clinical Transformation Officer, Dr. Pronovost is charged with fostering ideation and implementation for new protocols to eliminate defects in value and thereby enhance quality of care; developing new frameworks for population health management for UH’s more than one million patients; and managing the UH Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Network – one of the nation’s largest – comprising more than 581,000 members. In this role, Dr. Pronovost leads the system in championing a new narrative that focuses on keeping people Healthy at Home. Utilizing his previously successful concept of checklists, Dr. Pronovost created a new list of key principles for eliminating defects in value and has incorporated the framework into an analytic platform integrating claims, electronic medical record (EMR), and scheduling data, to make defects in value visible to clinicians. In just 12 months, this work fueled a reduction in annual costs per patient in the UH ACO by 9 percent.

Previously, Dr. Pronovost served as the Senior Vice President for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine as well as the founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. In this role, he worked to eliminate all harms in one health system following on his success in eliminating one harm in most health systems across the U.S. Dr. Pronovost also served as the Senior Vice President for Clinical Strategy and the Chief Medical officer for UnitedHealthcare.

Dr. Pronovost was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2011, elected as Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and has received multiple honorary degrees. Dr. Pronovost is an advisor to the World Health Organizations’ World Alliance for Patient Safety and regularly addresses the U.S. Congress on patient safety issues. In response to a White House executive order, Dr. Pronovost co-chaired the Healthcare Quality Summit to modernize the Department of Health and Human Services quality measurement system.

Dr. Pronovost earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. He completed his anesthesiology and critical care medicine residency as well as a fellowship in critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He earned his PhD in Clinical Investigation from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.