| Gordon D. Schiff, MD
Dr. Schiff joined the Brigham and Women's Hospital's Division of General Medicine as a clinician researcher in the area of patient safety and medical informatics in the fall of 2007. Previously, he was a senior attending physician in the Department of Internal Medicine, Cook County (Stroger) Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Rush Medical College.
He has been practicing general internal medicine for Chicago's underserved population for more than thirty years, and was Medical Director of Cook County's General Medical Clinic for nearly a decade.
He is currently PI of the Attorney General's Prescriber and Consumer Education Grant Project entitled Formulary Leveraged Improved Prescribing (FLIP) at Cook County and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of Pharmacy and the Department of Medicine. This initiative is designed to leverage the formulary committees at the two institutions to improve the appropriateness and safety of medication prescribing. He is also the Co-PI of the newly awarded Center for Research in Therapeutics CERT grant for the TOP-MED project (Tools for Optimizing Prescribing, Monitoring and Education related to medication usage) based at UIC. He was PI and Director of AHRQ-funded Rush-Cook County Developmental Center for Research in Patient Safety (DCERPS, Diagnosis Errors and Evaluation Research Project (DEER), whose activities and recommendations are summarized in a chapter in the AHRQ Advances in Patient Safety monograph (Vol 2). He has worked extensively with United States Pharmacopeia (USP) as a member of its Safe Medication Use expert panel, as well as past Chair of USP's Consumer Interest panel.
Dr. Schiff was editor of special issue (2/2005) of Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety devoted to the safety and reliability of the handling of critical lab and radiology results. This has recently been expanded into a book published by Joint Commission Resources, Getting Results: Reliably Communicating and Acting on Critical Test Results in 2006 (Dr. Schiff is editor and author of 5 chapters). He is author of the section on Diagnostic Error in the forthcoming WHO monograph Current Issues in Patient Safety: A Global Perspective being prepared by: The Committee on Research Priorities World Alliance for Patient Safety / World Health Organization.
He is a longtime member of the editorial Board of Medical Care, and also the Journal of Public Health Policy. He is currently Chair of the Medical Care of the American Public Health Association (APHA), and recipient of the 2005 Institute of Medicine Chicago (IOMC) Patient Safety Leader of the Year award, and the Institute for Safe Medical Practices (ISMP) 2006 Lifetime Achievement award. Last year (8/06) he was selected by Modern Healthcare as one of the “30 People for the Future”- (national leaders most “likely to continue to shape health care in the years and decades ahead.”)
