Editorial Team

Robert M. Wachter, MD, Editor

Robert M. Wachter is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF, where he also directs the Division of Hospital Medicine. Author of 250 articles and 6 books, he coined the term "hospitalist" in 1996 and is generally considered the "father" of the hospitalist field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He is past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine (1999–2000) and past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine (2012–2013). In 2004, he received the John M. Eisenberg Award, the nation's top honor in patient safety. In 2015, Modern Healthcare magazine ranked him as the most influential physician-executive in the United States, his eighth consecutive year in the top 50; he is the only academic physician to receive this recognition. His new book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age, was published in April 2015 and was a New York Times bestseller.

---

Kiran Gupta, MD, MPH, Associate Editor

Kiran Gupta is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. Her academic work focuses on patient safety issues including adverse events, mortality review, transfers and transitions of care and teaching on patient safety. She has conducted quality improvement projects on identifying preventable inpatient deaths through the use of electronic data capture, patient transfers and patient satisfaction. Her clinical responsibilities include caring for hospitalized patients on the medicine services at UCSF Medical Center.

Kiran is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, and earned an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed her residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where she stayed on to pursue a two-year fellowship in patient safety and quality improvement prior to joining the faculty at UCSF.

---

Sumant Ranji, MD, Associate Editor

Sumant Ranji is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and is an Associate Program Director for the UCSF Internal Medicine Residency Program. Sumant’s academic work centers around the intersection of graduate medical education and improving the quality and safety of care for hospitalized patients. He has conducted research and quality improvement projects that the relationship between residency training and patient safety, worked on developing novel methods of assessing resident performance, and developed curricula to integrate residents into hospital- and clinic-based quality improvement and patient safety activities. Sumant is also actively engaged in patient safety and quality improvement projects at UCSF Medical Center, primarily in the areas of care transitions at hospital discharge. His clinical responsibilities include caring for hospitalized patients on the medicine ward and consult services at UCSF Medical Center.

---

Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH, Associate Editor

Urmimala Sarkar is Associate Professor at UCSF, in the Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital. Urmimala's research focuses on ambulatory patient safety, including missed and delayed diagnosis, adverse drug events, and monitoring failures for outpatients with chronic diseases, particularly those with social vulnerabilities. She directs the San Francisco Ambulatory Safety Center for Innovation (ASCENT), a patient safety learning laboratory funded by AHRQ. Her interests include the role of communication in patient safety as well as health information technology interventions. Urmimala also leads the AHRQ-funded California Public Healthcare system Evidence Network and Innovations eXchange (PHoENIX), an effort to promote and study clinical innovations across safety-net health systems. She codirects the longitudinal quality improvement/patient safety curriculum for the UCSF–San Francisco General Hospital internal medicine residency program. Urmimala practices general internal medicine at the Richard H. Fine People's Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital.

Urmimala received her medical degree from the University of California, San Diego, and her master's in public health in epidemiology from UC Berkeley. She completed her internal medicine residency and research fellowship at UCSF prior to joining the faculty in 2008.

---

Bradley Sharpe, MD, Associate Editor

Brad Sharpe received his bachelor degree in chemistry from Stanford University and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. He completed his residency and chief residency in Internal Medicine at UCSF. He currently is a Professor of Clinical Medicine and hospitalist and maintains clinical, administrative, and educational roles.

Clinically, Brad serves as an attending on the inpatient service at Moffitt-Long Hospital 3-4 months a year, working closely with housestaff and students. Administratively, he acts as the Interim Division Chief for the Division of Hospital Medicine and the Associate Chief of the Medical Service at Moffitt-Long Hospital. In these roles, he helps manage the day-to-day operations of the Division and the inpatient services.

Educationally, Brad is the Associate Program Director for Inpatient Affairs for the UCSF Internal Medicine Residency. Brad lectures to the residents on topics including community-acquired pneumonia, effective signout, and updates in the medical literature. Brad is involved in medical student education – he lectures on patient interviewing, oral case presentations, and clinical topics such as hyponatremia and COPD exacerbations. Brad also graduated from the Stanford Faculty Development Clinical Teaching course and now teaches the class to UCSF faculty and Internal Medicine residents. He has given numerous presentations on improving clinical teaching both regionally and nationally. He has been the recipient of multiple teaching awards.

His research focuses on improving the field of hospital medicine and on medical education. He has published articles on faculty development, mentorship, housestaff supervision, oral case presentations, and community-acquired pneumonia.

In addition, Brad has multiple national roles in academic hospital medicine. He has served on multiple committees for the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM), including the Academic Committee. He is the former co-chair of the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) Academic Hospitalist Taskforce. He is also a co-director of the Academic Hospitalist Academy, an annual 4-day “boot camp” for junior academic hospitalists.

---

Kaveh Shojania, MD, Deputy & Consulting Editor

Kaveh Shojania is Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Quality and Safety and Director of the Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (C-QuIPS) at the University of Toronto, where he also sees patients as a hospital-based general internist. Kaveh's research focuses on identifying evidence-based patient safety interventions and effective strategies for translating evidence into practice. He has published more than 100 peer review articles, including in leading journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. He has lectured widely on issues related to the scholarly advancement of patient safety and quality improvement, including twice delivering invited lectures to the Institute of Medicine.

Before moving back to Canada in 2004, Kaveh was on the faculty at UCSF, where he was one of the founding editors of AHRQ WebM&M. He was also lead editor (and authored six chapters) of Making Healthcare Safer, the evidence report produced for AHRQ following the publication of the Institute of Medicine report, To Err Is Human. While at UCSF, Kaveh coauthored a book (with Dr. Wachter) on patient safety for a general audience that received excellent reviews in the New York Times and many other media and has sold approximately 50,000 copies. In 2004, Kaveh and Bob Wachter received one of the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety Awards from The Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the National Quality Forum for work in patient safety that has had an impact at a national level.

Kaveh received his medical degree from the University of Manitoba and completed his residency training at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. After a hospital medicine fellowship at UCSF, he joined the faculty there for several years before returning to Canada. He held a Canada Research Chair in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement from 2004–2013.

---

Audrey Lyndon, PhD, Associate Editor

Audrey Lyndon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Health Care Nursing at UCSF School of Nursing. Audrey's research focuses on patient safety and quality in maternal and newborn care with an emphasis on how communication and teamwork contribute to safety and quality, and on preventing maternal morbidity and mortality. Audrey teaches research methods and implementation science at UCSF. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and a project director for the AHRQ-funded Safety Learning Laboratory at Stanford. Audrey received her nursing degree from the UCSF. She also holds a master's degree in nursing and a PhD in nursing from UCSF.

---

Linda S. Franck, RN, PhD, Associate Editor

Dr. Franck is Professor and Chair of the Department of Family Health Care Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Nursing.

Linda has over 25 years experience in leading interdisciplinary teams to conduct clinical research to improve the quality and safety of hospital care for children, and has over 160 peer-reviewed publications on related topics. She has particular expertise in research regarding the patient and family experience of health care and has pioneered interventions to engage parents and children as partners in pain management and in research to improve quality of care and quality of life.

Linda received her bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of San Francisco and her master’s degree and PhD in nursing from UCSF. She rejoined the UCSF faculty 2010 after a decade at the University College London, Institute of Child Health where she was the first Chair of Children’s Nursing Research in the UK.

---

Sara Murray, MD, Informatics Consultant

Sara Murray is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She also serves as the Physician Lead for Clinical Informatics for UCSF Health. Her academic work involves large analytic projects using electronic health record (EHR) data to inform quality improvement efforts at the medical center, and she does research in predictive analytics. Operationally, she works with the EHR team at UCSF to optimize the current infrastructure and design novel informatics solutions for the medical center. Her clinical time is spent as a hospitalist, attending on the teaching and non-teaching medicine services as well as the medicine consultation service.

Sara received her bachelor degree from The College of William and Mary and her medical degree from UCSF. She completed her Internal Medicine residency training at UCSF and participated in a research fellowship prior to joining the faculty at UCSF.

---