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New Board Members and Fellows Elected at Annual Meeting of the Voting Fellows NEW YORK CITY, Dec. 19— Five new members of the Board of Trustees, fifty-nine new Fellows and eight Associate Fellows were elected at the Academy’s Annual Meeting of the Voting Fellows, held on Dec. 16, 2003, in the newly renovated second-floor conference rooms of the Academy. In addition, thirty Fellows were recognized on the occasion of their thirtieth year of membership. Twice as many new Fellows were elected in 2003 than in 2002, achieving an urgent goal of involving more health professionals in the notable pursuits of the156-year-old institution. In opening remarks, Academy President Dr. Jeremiah A. Barondess said the Academy will continue to grow in the next five to ten years as it expands collaborations and hires more researchers to explore health and the factors that erode it. As a result, a new building addition will need to be constructed, he said, urging Fellows to join the fundraising challenge. “I’d like to welcome you and hope that you’ll be vigorously involved,” Barondess told the approximately 100-person audience. The new trustees represent a prestigious cross-section of the business, medical and academic worlds. They are: Mark N. Kaplan, Partner and of Counsel at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom LLP; Dr. Thomas Q. Morris, Alumni Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons; Frank Savage, Chief Executive Officer of Savage Holdings LLC, a global financial services company; Dr. Edward H. Shortliffe, Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons; and, John D. Wren, President and Chief Executive Officer of Omnicom Group Inc., the world’s largest advertising and marketing communications company. In addition, Dr. Gerald E. Thomson was re-elected to the Board. In his keynote speech on health care quality, Dr. Mark R. Chassin said that most quality-improvement goals at hospitals involve cutting costs while delivering effective care. “It’s easy to say, but extremely difficult to do in the real world,” said Chassin, who is the Executive Vice President of Excellence in Patient Care at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. Chassin’s post is the only one of its kind nationally, created by hospital administrators in 2003 in response to a string of serious adverse events at the hospital. “We are trying something different following our plight with respect to quality and specific adverse events,” Chassin said. Among the high-profile errors was the death last January of a 57-year-old man who donated part of his liver to help his ill brother. In a report on the tragic incident, the State Department of Health concluded that poor postoperative follow-up care may have been a contributing factor in the patient’s death. Thirty-four Mount Sinai transplant patients had been left in the care of a lone first-year medical resident. Chassin, who is also chairman of the Department of Health Policy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said that no single medical error led to this or other recent adverse events at the hospital. Rather, caregivers missed many opportunities to intervene. “The cascade of errors would’ve stopped, and the patients wouldn’t have been harmed” had any number of smaller problems been caught along the way, he said. In his new position, Chassin intends to pursue solutions to achieve “unprecedented excellence” at the hospital in patient safety, clinical outcomes, the experience of both patient and family and the working environment for caregivers. Chassin said he will strive to involve clinicians in analyzing how care is provided at Mount Sinai, in measuring specific care processes and in implementing upgrades. Chassin intends to create a climate in which errors can be openly discussed and administrators seek solutions from staff. He also plans to offer retraining for those who make egregious errors. Human error is inevitable, Chassin said. But in spanning the entire medical center, this new excellence initiative aims to implement systems that will catch, anticipate and absorb errors to the greatest extent possible. “If you don’t like the results, you can’t change them unless you change the system that produces them,” Chassin said. The New York Academy of Medicine is a non-profit institution founded in 1847 that is dedicated to enhancing the health of the public through research, education and advocacy, with a particular focus on urban populations, especially the disadvantaged. Contact: |