Summary Remarks

Dr. Andrew Olson is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he practices hospital medicine and pediatrics. He serves as the founding Director of the Division of Hospital Medicine within the Department of Medicine.  Dr. Olson presently serves as the Director of Medical Education Research and Innovation in the Medical Education Outcomes Center, focusing on linking education with clinical and workforce outcomes. Dr. Olson's academic work focuses on the nature and development of clinical reasoning  as well as methods to measure and decrease diagnostic error.

Dr. Christina L. Cifra is a health services and patient safety researcher in the field of diagnostic excellence in pediatrics and critical care. She completed pediatric critical care fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and received formal quality improvement training as a resident scholar at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. She completed her MS degree in Translational Biomedicine, focusing on translation to populations, at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She is currently an attending pediatric intensivist in the Division of Medical Critical Care at Boston Children’s Hospital and a member of the faculty of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Cifra has published foundational studies on the frequency and causes of diagnostic error in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and has proposed a unified research agenda for diagnostic excellence in critical care medicine. She is currently investigating diagnostic error and the role of diagnostic uncertainty in the assessment of critically ill children on PICU admission and is conducting ethnographic work in the PICU to delineate the influence of referral communication on the PICU diagnostic process. She is also leading innovative work on diagnostic process handoffs across institutions, which includes studies aiming to standardize referral communication for inter-facility transfers to the PICU and improve feedback to PICU-referring clinicians. In addition to her scientific contributions, Dr. Cifra has also devoted considerable effort to facilitating wider recognition and support for scholarship in diagnostic excellence. She is the current Chair of the Research Committee of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine and is an Associate Editor for Diagnosis, the premier journal for diagnostic safety research.

Robert Trowbridge, MD is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and Director of Undergraduate Medical Curriculum at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine. He is a clinician-educator with expertise in teaching clinical reasoning and avoidance of diagnostic error. He has won over 20 clinical teaching awards and remains clinically active as a hospitalist. His research has centered on ways of helping to identify diagnostic errors and provide feedback to clinicians in a manner that improves diagnostic reliability with over 30 peer-reviewed publications and 20 book chapters. He served as the Co-Chair of the SIDM Education Committee from 2013-2016 and was a longtime member of the Planning Committee for the International Diagnostic Error in Medicine conference, chairing the conference in 2016 and 2017.

Doug Salvador leads the Department of Healthcare Quality at Baystate Health. He collaborates with colleagues throughout the system to promote a learning health system, develop strategy for quality and patient safety, and coordinate health care for the community. Using his training in medicine, engineering, and epidemiology, Dr. Salvador is focused on the redesign of healthcare delivery systems, promoting diagnostic excellence, undergraduate and postgraduate education of quality and safety, and fostering a culture of patient safety.

A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University (Biomedical Engineering) and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dr. Salvador trained in infectious diseases at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He practiced as a hospital epidemiologist after receiving a Masters in Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. He is Board President of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine.