Peter Pronovost

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Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD is an intensive care specialist physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland^[1]. He is a Professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, and Surgery and is Medical Director for the Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care.

He is credited for introducing an intensive care checklist protocol that saved 1500 lives and $100 million in the State of Michigan, during an 18-month period.^[2] According to Atul Gawande in the New Yorker, Pronovost's "work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade."^[3]

In 2008 TIME Magazine named Pronovost one of the 100 most influential people in the world.^[4]

1 Career
2 References
3 Further reading
4 See also

[edit] Career

Pronovost grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut. His parents were an elementary school teacher and a math professor. He received his B.S. from Fairfield University and M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.^[3]

In his Ph.D. thesis at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, he documented that in intensive-care units in Maryland, an intensive care specialist on the staff reduced death rates by a third.

In 2003 he founded the Quality and Safety Research Group. He has published over 200 articles and chapters on patient safety and advises the World Health Organization on improving patient safety measurement through WHO's World Alliance for Patient Safety. ^[5]

He started studying hospital-acquired infections in 2001, concluding that a simple checklist protocol would greatly reduce these infections and the medical errors that cause them.

In the 2003 Michigan study called the Keystone Initiative these infections dropped at a typical ICU from 2.7 per 1,000 patients to zero. The Keystone Initiative published its results in the December, 2006 New England Journal of Medicine.^[6] In the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan’s ICUs decreased by sixty-six per cent. In the Initiative’s first eighteen months, they estimated that 1500 lives and $100 million were saved. These results were sustained for almost four years.^[3]

Several reasons may explain why a simple checklist protocol is not more widely adapted:

Many physicians do not like being monitored by nurses or otherwise being forced to follow a checklist;
A wish to avoid standardized tasks and bureaucracy; and
A focus by researchers on "more exciting" issues such as disease biology and new treatment therapies.^[7]

According to Provonost:^[3]

The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is ensuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective it’s outrageous.

An internationally recognized expert on hospital safety, Pronovost has raised an alarm about the unintended consequences of computerization of patient records.^[8]