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In This Issue:
For her groundbreaking work in ambulatory patient safety, Tejal Gandhi, MD, MPH, executive director of Quality and Safety at BWH, was honored with the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award for Research from the National Quality Forum and The Joint Commission.
“Tejal Gandhi is clearly one of the most important leaders in ambulatory patient safety, given her numerous contributions to this area,” said David W. Bates, MD, chief of BWH’s Division of General Internal Medicine, who nominated Gandhi for the award. “Her work has been crucial to highlight the scope and breadth of ambulatory safety issues, to improve our understanding of the epidemiology of these events and to then focus on prevention.”
Gandhi’s work to better understand the epidemiology of a wide range of ambulatory safety concerns is responsible for drawing national attention to safety issues and potential prevention in this important patient care setting. She has been instrumental in increasing knowledge and awareness of safety issues in the outpatient setting and in designing improvement strategies for this setting, particularly through the use of information technology.
Gandhi has completed extensive work on evaluating the incidence and preventability of adverse drug events in the outpatient setting and was the lead author of a landmark study in 2003 that identified the epidemiology of adverse drug events in outpatients.
The National Quality Forum and The Joint Commission present the award annually to individuals and organizations that have made an important contribution to patient safety and health care quality in research or system innovation. Honorees received the award at the NQF National Policy Conference in Maryland Oct. 15.