Joe Kiani Wins 2023 Robert L. Wears Patient Safety Leadership Award

Joe Kiani, founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF), has been awarded the 2023 Robert L. Wears Patient Safety Leadership Award in the individual category, along with Dr. Kathryn Kellogg, Vice President for Patient Safety at the MedStar Institute for Quality & Safety.

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Joe Kiani, Founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and Founder, CEO and Chairman of Masimo (Photo: Business Wire)

The award represents recognition for Kiani’s work towards eliminating preventable medical harm and creating a safer healthcare system around the world. For over a decade, his global non-profit, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation has inspired thousands of clinicians around the world to make a public commitment to ZERO harm. The Foundation brought together the best patient safety minds around the world to create Actionable Evidence Based Practices to address the most common problems and provided them to every hospital without charge. At the annual summits, patients, clinicians, healthcare technology innovators and world leaders come together to discuss solutions that save lives. Over 90 companies have signed a pledge to share their data so that researchers can utilize it to develop algorithms that can catch errors before they become deadly.

Kiani has appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee and laid out a plan to help eradicate preventable patient deaths in healthcare. He speaks around the world on the importance of putting patient safety first. Kiani is also on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology working on patient safety efforts.

“It’s an honor to receive this award,” stated Joe Kiani, Founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and Founder, CEO and Chairman of Masimo. “We have the know-how and technology to eliminate preventable patient deaths today. To err is human but to not put the processes in place to prevent those errors is inhumane.”

“Dr. Wears’ work in patient safety was groundbreaking, and those honoured with this award in his name have continued that legacy, focusing on programs and procedures that advance this crucial initiative,” said Steven A. Godwin, M.D., FACEP, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UF Health Jacksonville. “Mr. Kiani and the team at the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and Masimo should be incredibly proud of continuing down this path. Their work helping patients in hospitals, homes and elsewhere is crucial to improving health care delivery and positively impacting patient outcomes.”

Kiani’s journey in healthcare started 33 years ago when he became the co-inventor of what is recognized today as modern pulse oximetry. The technology reduced false alarms by 95% and this new accuracy reduced severe retinopathy of prematurity in newborns and significantly improved critical congenital heart disease screening. His invention now monitors over 200 million patients a year around the world. When used for continuous monitoring with a patient surveillance system, this new technology was demonstrated to reduce rapid response team activations, ICU transfers, and hospital costs. In the Covid-19 pandemic, Kiani’s innovations allowed patients to be monitored remotely at home (see CNN story).

Since 2018, the award has been presented in honor of the late Robert L. Wears, MD, MS, PhD, an emergency medicine physician who transformed the way in which investigators approach patient safety research. A pioneer in the field and active researcher, Dr. Wears provided mentorship and guidance to an array of healthcare providers pursuing careers in safety science, while serving as a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine–Jacksonville for more than 20 years.

Other winners in 2023 included Dr. Saravana Kumar and the International Federation of Emergency Medicine and Quality/Patient Safety Special Interest Group, in the organization category. Dr. David Nash and Charles Wohlforth won the team category for their book, ‘How Covid Crashed the System,’ probing America's response to the pandemic as a medical error requiring investigation and systemic solutions. Lastly, Dr. Anna Palmisano, who led the Marylanders for Patient Rights movement in their four-year quest to pass the Maryland Hospital Patients' Bill of Rights, was awarded the volunteer category.

ABOUT THE PATIENT SAFETY MOVEMENT FOUNDATION

In 2012, Joe Kiani founded the non-profit Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF) to eliminate preventable medical errors in hospitals. His team worked with patient safety experts from around the world to create Actionable Evidence-Based Practices (AEBP) that address the top challenges. The AEBP is available without charge to hospitals online. Hospitals are encouraged to make a formal commitment to ZERO preventable deaths, and healthcare technology companies are asked to sign the Open Data Pledge to share their data so that predictive algorithms that can identify errors before they become fatal can be developed. The Foundation's annual World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit brings together all stakeholders, including patients, healthcare providers, medical technology companies, government employers, and private payers. The PSMF was established through the support of the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in Healthcare. For more information, please visit psmf.org.

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