Hi, I’m Mike,
Patient Safety Experts was started as one physician’s observations around patient safety in our hospitals today.
This website aims to organize my thoughts around common patient safety challenges as healthcare transitions into digital health and high reliability.
It’s a challenging and exciting time to be in healthcare; perhaps something you find here will make it a little easier.
My Blogging History
PSE is the 5th blog I have started over the past 20 years. I started my first blog as a medical resident in 2004. At the time, I had just finished medical school and was a couple of hundred thousand dollars in debt. When I wasn’t in the OR taking care of patients, I read and learned about investing. I discovered the world of personal finance blogs and started chronicling my journey to “riches” online. I managed to skimp and save a few thousand dollars during residency and made a total of $10 with the blog before shutting it down in 2008. By then, something new had caught my interest.
The App Store
Many of you will not remember the excitement when Apple released the first iPhone; it was a transformational tech device. I was more excited, however, when Steve Jobs opened the app store to external developers in July of 2008. That July, I had just finished residency and moved across the country to start my cardiothoracic anesthesiology fellowship. One of my friends and I began developing apps for the Apple app store. We started by developing apps to solve problems we encountered during residency. Over the next decade, we developed over 12 different iPhone apps. Unfortunately, ten years later, generating enough revenue to meet the development cost is challenging as the platforms continue to advance. As the market and development costs changed, we have reduced the number of apps we support to five.
In addition, we now spend the extra hours outside of work with our families, leaving less time for development. While we continue to make incremental improvements to these apps, the excitement, and energy that came from opening a new platform and era in tech is gone.
Professional Growth
In the OR, my anesthesiology career started in private practice. That first year was a steep learning curve with many challenging situations. I was surprised by the lack of quality of care tracking by the group I had joined, and I created an anesthesia outcomes tracking system for the group using pen and paper. After a year in private practice, I transitioned back into a teaching hospital, working with residents. I continued to look for opportunities to improve patient safety and eventually took over as the medical director for patient safety and quality for Anesthesiology. In this role, my interest and knowledge of Lean, Patient Safety, and Quality improvement began to grow, and I started looking for a way to organize and share what I have learned with others. The result is this blog.
Learning More about Patient Safety
At this point, while I would consider myself a patient safety professional, I am far from an expert in all things patient safety. There are areas, however, where, through years of hands-on technical experience, training, and improvement, I feel I have knowledge and tips to share with others.
For more information from true professionals, I recommend you check out the links below:
- The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Their IHI open school is a great way to get started with patient safety. They also offer the certified professional in patient safety (CPPS) certificate, which is a great way to demonstrate your interest in patient safety to others if you are just starting your journey.
- The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is a federal agency that has put out a lot of great information on patient safety.
