Peter Pronovost

Peter J. Pronovost
File:Pronovost peter download 3.jpg
Born	1964/5 Waterbury, Connecticut
Residence	Baltimore, Maryland
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Anesthesiology Critical Care Medicine
Institutions	Johns Hopkins Hospital
Alma mater	Fairfield, B.A., Sc.D. (hon) Johns Hopkins, M.D., Ph.D
Known for	Intensive care checklist protocol
Notable awards	2008 Time 100 2008 MacArthur Fellow

Peter J. Pronovost is an intensive care specialist physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, and Surgery, Professor of Healthcare Management at the Carey Business School, Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and is Medical Director for the Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care.

He introduced an intensive care checklist protocol that during an 18-month period saved 1500 lives and $100 million in the State of Michigan. According to Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, Pronovost's "work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade". In 2008 Time named Pronovost one of the 100 most influential people in the world. That same year, Pronovost was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Pronovost's book Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor's Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out was released in February 2010.

Early life and education

Pronovost grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut. His parents were an elementary school teacher and a math professor. He received his B.S. from Fairfield University, M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In his Ph.D. thesis at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, he documented that in intensive-care units in Maryland, an intensive care specialist on the staff reduced death rates by a third.

Work

External video
210px
2008 MacArthur Fellow: Peter Pronovost, MacArthur Foundation on YouTube, 2:14
Pronovost checklist, CurrentMedicine.TV on YouTube, 11:40

In 2003 he founded the Quality and Safety Research Group. He has published over 200 articles and chapters on patient safety and advises the World Health Organization on improving patient safety measurement through WHO's World Alliance for Patient Safety.

He started studying hospital-acquired infections in 2001, concluding that a simple 5 item check-list protocol would greatly reduce infections when inserting a central venous catheter;

Doctors should:

1. Wash their hands with soap.
2. Clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic.
3. Put sterile drapes over the entire patient.
4. Wear a sterile mask, hat, gown and gloves.
5. Put a sterile dressing over the catheter site.

In the Keystone Initiative, a 2003 study by a collection of Michigan hospitals and health organizations, the median rate of infections at a typical ICU dropped from 2.7 per 1,000 patients to zero after three months. The Keystone Initiative published its results in the December, 2006 New England Journal of Medicine. In the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan’s ICUs decreased by sixty-six per cent. In the Initiative’s first eighteen months, they estimated that 1500 lives and $100 million were saved. These results were sustained for almost four years.

Several reasons may explain why a simple checklist protocol is not more widely adapted:

• Many physicians do not like being monitored by nurses or otherwise being forced to follow a checklist;
• A wish to avoid standardized tasks and bureaucracy; and
• A focus by researchers on "more exciting" issues such as disease biology and new treatment therapies.

According to Pronovost,

The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is ensuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective it’s outrageous.

In 2008, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2011, Pronovost was recognized for his outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service with election to membership in the Institute of Medicine, one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. On March 28, 2013, he was named a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins University.

In 2013, Pronovost co-founded Doctella, a startup that provides surgical checklists for patients to improve patient engagement, patient safety, and lead to better health outcomes.

Personal life

Peter Pronovost has two children, Ethan and Emma Pronovost. His wife, Marlene, is a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins.

See also

• Evidence-based medicine
• Iatrogenesis
• Medical error
• Patient safety

External links

• Peter J. Pronovost, Testimony before Government Oversight Committee, April 16, 2008 from johnshopkins.edu
• Johns Hopkins University Quality and Safety Research Group from jhu.edu
• Teaming Up to Improve Quality
• "The Secret to Fighting Infections", article on Pronovost by Laura Landro, Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2011.