Kaveh G. Shojania | |
---|---|
Nationality | Canadian |
Occupation(s) | Doctor, academic and an author |
Awards | John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety Award, National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (2004) |
Academic background | |
Education | B.Sc., Biochemistry Doctor of Medicine |
Alma mater | University of Manitoba University of British Columbia Harvard University University of California, San Francisco |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Toronto Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre |
Kaveh G. Shojania is a Canadian doctor,academic and an author. He is the vice chair of quality &innovation in the department of medicine at the University of Toronto [1] as well as staff physician at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. [2]
Shojania is most known for his works on evidence synthesis,patient safety strategies and health quality improvement. Among his authored works are his publications in academic journals,including the Journal of the American Medical Association and New England Journal of Medicine [3] as well as a book titled Internal Bleeding:The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes. [4] [5] Moreover,he is the recipient of 2004 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety Award from the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. [6]
Shojania completed his B.Sc. Honors in Biochemistry from the University of Manitoba in 1990,followed by a Doctor of Medicine degree from the same institution in 1994. Between 1994 and 1995,he did his internship in internal medicine from the University of British Columbia,followed by a medical residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital (Harvard University) in Boston. From 1998 to 2000,he was the first fellow in Hospital Medicine at the University of California,San Francisco (UCSF),working with Robert M. Wachter,who coined the term 'hospitalist' in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine two years earlier. Shojania was the first such hospitalist fellow in the US. Hospital Medicine. [7]
Shojania initiated his academic career at the University of California,San Francisco. He held various positions at UCSF,beginning as a clinical instructor from 1998 to 2000 and later serving as an assistant professor of medicine from 2000 to 2004. Subsequently,he transitioned to the University of Ottawa,initially as an assistant professor from 2004 to 2007 and later as an associate professor from 2007 to 2008. From 2009 to 2021,he worked as the adjunct faculty of Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. [2]
Between 2009 and 2019,Shojania served as the director of Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at the University of Toronto,where he developed education and training programs for healthcare professionals interested in improving the quality of healthcare delivery. Since 2015,he has been a Vice Chair of quality &innovation in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. [1]
Shojania worked as the scientist in the clinical epidemiology program at the Ottawa Health Research Institute from 2004 to 2008. In 2011,he became Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Quality &Safety,later co-Editor-in-Chief with Mary Dixon-Woods of Cambridge University. Since 2020,he has held the position of emeritus editor at the journal. [8] Moreover,He has served as a staff physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre since 2008. [1]
Focusing on effective patient safety strategies,Shojania authored the book titled Internal Bleeding:The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes,wherein he highlighted the concerning frequency of errors in contemporary healthcare,underscoring the imperative for immediate reforms to mitigate risks and safeguard patients from harm. [4] While reviewing the book,Barron H. Lerner in his New York Times article said "Internal Bleeding is an erudite,readable and well-argued book. The authors describe the origins of the patient safety movement,which has drawn from a number of fields outside medicine -- most notably,the aircraft industry." He further commended author's efforts for effectively advocating the establishment of a "safety culture" using a systematic approach. [9]
Shojania has authored publications spanning the fields of patient safety and health quality improvement. Google Scholar lists over 24,000 citations to his work. The initial stage of his research career coincided with the launch of the patient safety movement [10] and subsequent attention to healthcare quality more broadly. [11] Many of the prominent figures advancing this important movement within healthcare advocated adopting strategies from other high-risk industries,such as commercial aviation and nuclear power. [12] They also advocated adopting intuitively appealing but unproven healthcare interventions. Shojania's early contributions amounted to adopting an 'evidence-based medicine' as in the rest of biomedicine,namely to test these interventions in rigorous research,such as randomized controlled trials. He published commentaries advocating this approach for patient safety in the Journal of the American Medical Association [13] and the New England Journal of Medicine, [14] among other publications.
His work in evidence synthesis related to interventions designed to improve healthcare delivery has tended to highlight the degree to which promising interventions often turn out to have disappointingly small effects when evaluated rigorously. In his 2006 meta-analysis of 60+ studies on diabetes care improvement,it was revealed that most strategies had only small to modest effects,Interventions with non-physician case managers adjusting medications without physician authorization showed significant and robust glycemic control improvements in adults with type 2 diabetes. [15] But,a large number of ongoing trials in this area led to a significantly revised analysis,published in the Lancet in 2012,which showed that all of the strategies tended to deliver small improvements. [16]
Similarly,while investigating the impact of Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) meta-analysis of 108 studies again revealed small improvements in the care patients received. [17] In related research,he conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 108 studies,revealing small to moderate improvements with substantial heterogeneity,and exploring factors influencing the effectiveness of CDSS interventions in diverse clinical settings. [18]
Focusing on diagnostic errors,Shojania's systematic review of 53 autopsy series over 40 years revealed a relative decrease in diagnostic error rates,indicating major errors in 23.5% of cases and class I errors in 9.0%,suggesting that while the likelihood of uncovering clinically missed diagnoses has diminished,contemporary institutions may still experience major error rates ranging from 8.4% to 24.4% and class I error rates from 4.1% to 6.7%. [19] His 2011 work systematically reviewed and ranked patient safety practices,identifying 11 interventions with strong supporting evidence,primarily focusing on clinical interventions related to hospitalization,critical care,and surgery,while emphasizing the need for further research to address gaps in evidence and explore practices from non-health care industries. [20] Moreover,his article addressed the challenge of outdated systematic reviews in healthcare,revealing that 23% of reviews were obsolete within 2 years,emphasizing the need for timely updates to ensure the currency and accuracy of evidence-based practices. [21]
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious,explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients." The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician,the values of the patient,and the best available scientific information to guide decision-making about clinical management. The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians about individual patients.
A randomized controlled trial is a form of scientific experiment used to control factors not under direct experimental control. Examples of RCTs are clinical trials that compare the effects of drugs,surgical techniques,medical devices,diagnostic procedures or other medical treatments.
Cochrane is a British international charitable organisation formed to synthesize medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving health professionals,patients and policy makers. It includes 53 review groups that are based at research institutions worldwide. Cochrane has approximately 30,000 volunteer experts from around the world.
A medical error is a preventable adverse effect of care ("iatrogenesis"),whether or not it is evident or harmful to the patient. This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease,injury,syndrome,behavior,infection,or other ailment.
A medical guideline is a document with the aim of guiding decisions and criteria regarding diagnosis,management,and treatment in specific areas of healthcare. Such documents have been in use for thousands of years during the entire history of medicine. However,in contrast to previous approaches,which were often based on tradition or authority,modern medical guidelines are based on an examination of current evidence within the paradigm of evidence-based medicine. They usually include summarized consensus statements on best practice in healthcare. A healthcare provider is obliged to know the medical guidelines of their profession,and has to decide whether to follow the recommendations of a guideline for an individual treatment.
A systematic review is a scholarly synthesis of the evidence on a clearly presented topic using critical methods to identify,define and assess research on the topic. A systematic review extracts and interprets data from published studies on the topic,then analyzes,describes,critically appraises and summarizes interpretations into a refined evidence-based conclusion. For example,a systematic review of randomized controlled trials is a way of summarizing and implementing evidence-based medicine.
A hierarchy of evidence,comprising levels of evidence (LOEs),that is,evidence levels (ELs),is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from experimental research,especially medical research. There is broad agreement on the relative strength of large-scale,epidemiological studies. More than 80 different hierarchies have been proposed for assessing medical evidence. The design of the study and the endpoints measured affect the strength of the evidence. In clinical research,the best evidence for treatment efficacy is mainly from meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Systematic reviews of completed,high-quality randomized controlled trials –such as those published by the Cochrane Collaboration –rank the same as systematic review of completed high-quality observational studies in regard to the study of side effects. Evidence hierarchies are often applied in evidence-based practices and are integral to evidence-based medicine (EBM).
Patient safety is a discipline that emphasizes safety in health care through the prevention,reduction,reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse events,often known as patient safety incidents,experienced by patients was not well known until the 1990s,when multiple countries reported significant numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors. Recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world,the World Health Organization (WHO) calls patient safety an endemic concern. Indeed,patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline supported by an immature yet developing scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety with mobile health apps being a growing area of research.
BMJ Quality &Safety is a peer-reviewed healthcare journal dealing with improving patient safety and quality of care. The journal was established in 1992 as Quality in Health Care,subsequently became Quality &Safety in Health Care and obtained its current name in 2011. It co-owned with the Health Foundation and is published by BMJ Publishing Group. The editor-in-chief role is shared by Bryony Dean Franklin and Eric J Thomas. Before them the co-editors in chief were Kaveh Shojania and Mary Dixon-Woods.
Health information technology (HIT) is health technology,particularly information technology,applied to health and health care. It supports health information management across computerized systems and the secure exchange of health information between consumers,providers,payers,and quality monitors. Based on a 2008 report on a small series of studies conducted at four sites that provide ambulatory care –three U.S. medical centers and one in the Netherlands,the use of electronic health records (EHRs) was viewed as the most promising tool for improving the overall quality,safety and efficiency of the health delivery system.
Peter Christian Gøtzsche is a Danish physician,medical researcher,and former leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen,Denmark. He is a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration and has written numerous reviews for the organization. His membership in Cochrane was terminated by its Governing Board of Trustees on 25 September 2018.
Patient participation is a trend that arose in answer to medical paternalism. Informed consent is a process where patients make decisions informed by the advice of medical professionals.
Alessandro Liberati was an Italian healthcare researcher and clinical epidemiologist,and founder of the Italian Cochrane Centre.
Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource,as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields,it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them;that is,to ensure good quality of life,cure illnesses when possible,to extend life expectancy,and so on. Researchers use a variety of quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality,including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by medical diagnosis,a decrease in the number of risk factors which people have following preventive care,or a survey of health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.
A rapid response system (RRS) is a system implemented in many hospitals designed to identify and respond to patients with early signs of clinical deterioration on non-intensive care units with the goal of preventing respiratory or cardiac arrest. A rapid response system consists of two clinical components,an afferent component,an efferent component,and two organizational components –process improvement and administrative.
The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM),based in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford,is an academic-led centre dedicated to the practice,teaching,and dissemination of high quality evidence-based medicine to improve healthcare in everyday clinical practice. CEBM was founded by David Sackett in 1995. It was subsequently directed by Brian Haynes and Paul Glasziou. Since 2010 it has been led by Professor Carl Heneghan,a clinical epidemiologist and general practitioner.
Allegiance bias in behavioral sciences is a bias resulted from the investigator's or researcher's allegiance to a specific school of thought. Researchers/investigators have been exposed to many types of branches of psychology or schools of thought. Naturally they adopt a school or branch that fits with their paradigm of thinking. More specifically,allegiance bias is when this leads therapists,researchers,etc. believing that their school of thought or treatment is superior to others. Their superior belief to these certain schools of thought can bias their research in effective treatments trials or investigative situations leading to allegiance bias. Reason being is that they may have devoted their thinking to certain treatments they have seen work in their past experiences. This can lead to errors in interpreting the results of their research. Their “pledge”to stay within their own paradigm of thinking may affect their ability to find more effective treatments to help the patient or situation they are investigating.
Physician burnout has been classified as a psychological syndrome that can be expressed as a prolonged response to due chronic occupational stressors. In the practice of medicine,it has been known to affect a wide variety of individuals from medical students to practicing physicians;although,its impact reaches far beyond that. Because of the toll taken on the healthcare industry,various treatment and prevention strategies have been developed at individual,team,and organizational levels in hopes to seek the best method of addressing this epidemic.
A non-pharmaceutical intervention or non-pharmacological intervention (NPI) is any type of health intervention which is not primarily based on medication. Some examples include exercise,sleep improvement,or dietary habits.
Kathryn McDonald is an American scientist who is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University. She serves as co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Diagnostic Excellence. McDonald previously led the Centre for Health Policy at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Her research considers what makes for high-quality and safe healthcare delivery systems.