Plenary – Best of the Best Oral Abstracts

Dr. Andrea Bradford is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, where she divides her effort between clinical and research missions. Her clinical practice focuses on behavioral interventions for adults with chronic medical conditions, whereas most of her research focuses on understanding how clinicians and systems can improve the safety of the diagnostic process. Dr. Bradford is also involved in teaching medical students and psychology trainees. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings and has served on the boards of the Society for Health Psychology and the Association of Psychologists in Academic Health Centers.

Dr. Kelly Gleason is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. Her approach to diagnostic quality springs from her experiences as a bedside nurse. In her work, she explores best ways to systematically hear from patients and nurses to inform diagnostic safety efforts.

Dr. David Klimpl, MD, MS, is an academic Hospitalist at The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center where he specializes in Hospitalist Advanced Practice Provider education and curriculum development.  Dr. Klimpl has built Hospitalist APP curricula in multiple academic centers including Johns Hopkins and The University of Colorado and has published multiple research articles on this topic. He is the PI of a highly successful grant funded hospitalist APP clinical reasoning curriculum and has been asked to present on his educational research nationally and internationally.  Dr. Klimpl has been awarded or nominated for five teaching awards and is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha and Gold Humanism Honor Societies.    In his free time he enjoys cooking, skiing, and playing with his dog, Marzipan.

Allie Tran, PhD, RN is a Senior Research Scientist with the MedStar Health Research Institute and MedStar Health Institute for Quality and Safety. Dr. Tran has a clinical background in critical care nursing, and received her PhD in nursing with a focus on health systems research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Future of Nursing Scholar. She has previously taught nursing and medical students in clinical simulation, team-based communication, health innovation, and older adult health. Dr. Tran's research is aimed at uncovering knowledge related to the organization and delivery of care in hospital and ambulatory-care settings, improving diagnostic communication and quality for older adults, and developing nurse-led interventions to improve quality and safety. She has studied other important and related health workforce issues, including nurse turnover, nurse transitions between specialty areas, travel nurse staffing, and primary care physician workforce diversity.

Viralkumar Vaghani is a Biostatistician at the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety (IQuESt) VA Houston and Baylor College of Medicine. His research interests include improving patient safety, developing electronic trigger algorithms to measure diagnostic errors, and application of machine learning to improve diagnosis in medicine. He is a former SIDM fellow of Diagnostic Excellence.

Andrew Zimolzak is an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, department of medicine, section of health services research; and the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety (IQuESt). Dr. Zimolzak has studied the secondary use of routinely collected medical data for 10 years. He has direct experience with the retrieval and analysis of data from electronic medical records from multiple health care systems, as well as medical insurance claims. This work has been applied to physicians’ delayed follow-up of patient test results, diagnostic errors in the emergency department, randomized trials of medications for hypertension and heart failure, pharmacogenomics, lung cancer genomic precision medicine, kidney failure prediction, and outcome prediction in COVID-19. Dr. Zimolzak has practiced general internal medicine in urgent care and inpatient hospital settings for over ten years. In addition to research efforts, he is a teaching hospitalist at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston. His interests include deriving accurate phenotype information from medical records, machine learning for improved efficiency of data cleaning, and research code reproducibility and sharing. He has been funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Dr. Ava L. Liberman is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Liberman earned her medical degree from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine. She completed her internship in Internal Medicine and residency in Neurology at Northwestern University serving as a Chief Resident in her final year followed by a two-year fellowship in Vascular Neurology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She was a SIDM fellow in 2016. Dr. Liberman's research interests include healthcare delivery, implementation science, clinical decision making, diagnostic error, and headache medicine. Dr. Liberman is currently funded by a K23 career development award from the National Institute of Health and her work has been published in high-impact peer-reviewed journals.