Don Berwick
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Donald M. Berwick (born in 1947 in Moodus, CT) is Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Health Care Policy at the Harvard Medical School, and professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He also practices as a pediatrician at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, and consults at Massachusetts General Hospital. Concurrently, he is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), a not-for-profit organization which focuses on improvement of health care world-wide.
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[edit] Biography
Berwick graduated with a B.A. from Harvard College, and received a M.P.P. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government and an M.D from the Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Boston.
Berwick began his career as a pediatrician at Harvard Community Health Plan and in 1983 he became the plan's first Vice President of Quality-of-Care Measurement. In that position, Berwick investigated quality control measures in other industries such as aeronautics and manufacturing and considered their application in health care settings. From 1987-1991, Berwick was co-founder and Co-Principal Investigator for the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Health Care designed to teach quality improvement to 21 health care organizations. In 1989, Berwick left Harvard Community Health Plan and continued to administrate and teach quality improvement programs.
His nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement, or IHI, was founded in 1991 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has about 100 full-time employees, another 400 adjunct faculty members, and an annual budget of $27 million, with revenue coming from contracts with health care systems and foundation grants. Berwick is paid a base annual salary of $377,000. More movement than consultancy, IHI runs courses, conferences, improvement projects, and a website and membership network designed to let health care institutions learn from one another. Same day appointments, personal medical records,CPOE to eliminate medication errors, transparency in hospital performance, doctors would have less discretion in treatment options and would follow evidence based care guidelines
Dr. Berwick was appointed by U.S. President Bill Clinton to serve on the Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Healthcare Industry in 1997 and 1998, where he focused on understanding the issues facing health care delivery systems, and promoting ways to improve the quality of health care. From that experience, he became convinced that an effort to reform health care practices that was modelled on techniques from political campaigns, could be effective at mobilizing action and focusing attention on underlying quality problems in the health care system.
He launched The 100,000 Lives Campaign at the IHI annual meeting in December, 2004 to begin to address these problems. This campaign was a 18 month challenge to front-line workers in health care to 'do the right thing' in 6 areas:
- Deliver reliable, evidence-based care for acute myocardial infarction.
- Prevent adverse drug events (ADEs) by implementing medication reconciliation.
- Prevent central line infections.
- Prevent surgical site infections.
- Prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia.
- Deploy rapid response teams to address the issues identified.
Eighteen months later, IHI announced that they had "saved 122,300 lives" through these efforts, a claim that has been partially substantiated, though not all these lives were able to be directly attributable to the campaign. Despite this, the reference notes that "Campaigns are about “energizing the base,” and they inevitably involve the selective use of statistics and evidence to promote a point of view and to catalyze action. In this way, IHI has been extraordinarily effective in moving the system to improve quality and safety. Too much statistical or epidemiological introspection could well have slowed down the effort."
Dr. Berwick has written articles about this campaign in Newsweek, was featured by Katie Couric in her CBS series on The American Spirit, and has also been highlighted for his action-orientation and pioneering work in the health care industry by improvement guru Tom Peters. Dr. Berwick's efforts have also been heralded in a number of popular books on health care, evidence-based medicine, and data mining.
He has published over 110 scientific articles and is the co-author of several books, notably Curing Health Care, New Rules: Regulation, Markets and the Quality of American Health Care, and Cholesterol, Children with Heart Disease: An Analysis of Alternatives.
Berwick distills his vision for health care into five concepts: no needless death, no needless pain, no helplessness, no unwanted waits, and no waste.
In December 2006, Dr. Berwick launched IHI's next campaign, to save 5 million lives over two years.
[edit] Quotations
- "Some is not a number. Soon is not a time."
- "When I climb Mount Rainier I face less risk of death than I’ll face on the operating table."
- "What can you fix by Tuesday?'
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- Gawande, Atul, "Better", 2008, ISBN 0312427654
- Ayres, Ian, "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart", 2007, ISBN 0553805401
