Speaker of The Week for August 31, 2011: Dr. Warren Sandeberg
As graduate school has returned to session, we are once again offering the Vanderbilt Healthcare Improvement Group (VHIG) Digest. As you will notice, our Digest has undergone a transformation this year. Given the abundance of healthcare news related to quality improvement and patient safety, our organization felt it appropriate to increase the frequency of our digest from biweekly to weekly. With this increase in frequency, we wish to avoid flooding our subscribers with too many news stories and research findings. To that end, we have created a “Top 3 Stories” format for our weekly digest. We hope that you enjoy the new look, and please don’t hesitate to e-mail us if you have suggestions to improve our digest.
One other feature that we wish to include in conjunction with our digest this fall is the Speaker of the Week feature. As you may know, VHIG launched a Fundamentals of Quality Improvement in Healthcare Elective last year. With over 40 students enrolled from the Schools of Management, Medicine, Nursing, our elective was extremely well-received, and even gained national recognition from the Academy for Healthcare Improvement with the Duncan Neuhauser Award for Special Recognition for Excellence in a Student-Led Initiative. We are offering this elective again this fall, and have enrolled almost 60 students in the course. Because we have a larger classroom space this year, we are offering students and faculty at Vanderbilt the opportunity to attend select classes this year. The Speaker of the Week feature will allow our subscribers to gain more information about specific classes that they may wish to attend. If you would like to attend a particular class, please e-mail us at vhig@vanderbilt.edu for more information on location and time of the class.
Speaker of the Week for August 31st, 2011: Dr. Warren Sandberg
Warren S. Sandberg is Professor and Chair of Anesthesiology at Vanderbilt University Medical School. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He completed anesthesia residency and twelve years as faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Sandberg then moved to Vanderbilt in 2010 as the 7th Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology.
Sandberg’s clinical interests range from ambulatory surgery to anesthesia for liver transplantation. His research career began in structural biology and mechanisms of anesthesia, but he has now developed broad research interests in medical technology, informatics, patient safety and OR & procedure suite operations. A particular focus is using medical information systems for process monitoring, decision support and process control.
For our first class of the year, Dr. Sandberg will be leading the students through an introduction to quality improvement. Using real examples from his career as an anesthesiologist and researcher, Dr. Sandberg explore the modern-day science of quality improvement, including the challenges, opportunities, and financial implications of quality improvement.
If you would like to attend this session on the evening of Wednesday, August 31st, please e-mail us at vhig@vanderbilt.edu for more details.