BOULDER, Colo., July 30, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Amplifire is pleased to announce that Brent James, MD, MStat, will serve as Chairman of the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance Clinical Innovation Advisory Board. Dr. James has long been recognized internationally for his work in clinical quality improvement, patient safety and the infrastructure that underlies successful improvement efforts.
In a recent meeting with the ten system Alliance members, Dr. James stated, “I first ran into Amplifire several years ago, and was deeply impressed with the learning model behind it. We then built out a Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infection course in the platform and saw very strong performance in reducing incidents.”
Bob Burgin, Amplifire CEO and Founder of the Healthcare Alliance noted, “I have followed Brent’s work since To Err is Human was published nearly twenty years ago. He brings a level of thought to these challenges that is inspiring to me.”
Dr. James expanded on the paradigm that brought him to chair the Advisory Board, “You take massive amounts of information, load it into clinicians’ heads, and expect those health professionals to somehow correctly deliver it to individual patients. David Eddie, who invented the science behind evidence-based medicine and the term itself, said it nicely: ‘The complexity of modern medicine exceeds the capacity of the unaided expert mind.'”
Dr James continued, “I’ve long held that the real solution is to move it out of human memory and build systems that make it easy to do it right. You need a 2 part solution. You need better underlying systems, but the idea of an expert mind is still essential. It doesn’t go away. What I saw in Amplifire, was a tool that much more accurately, completely and rapidly loaded that knowledge base. It gave us not just the ability to transmit it, it gave us the ability to measure how well we had done that and identify specific areas where things were falling short. I personally believe that this combination of really smart professionals, topically focused and tightly trained around specific issues, in conjunction with effective systems, has the potential to create a care delivery system that would perform far beyond what any of us now believe possible. We have not yet begun to understand how good we can be. ”
Burgin stated, “Brent’s accomplishments in this field are well known and respected, and we are honored that he will be chairing our Healthcare Alliance Innovation Advisory Board. His counsel carries substantial weight.”
Dr. James continued, “As an advisory board, we are a group of scientific experts taking a close look at focused training solutions and their use in real clinical applications. The kinds of questions Bob is asking of us include: Are we evaluating the clinical impact correctly? Are we thinking about this problem in the right way? What are the questions we should really ask, not just of the content but also of the underlying platform? Are we doing it right?”
Dr. James is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Boston, MA. He is also a Senior Advisor at the Leavitt Group and a Senior Advisor at Health Catalyst, in Salt Lake City, Utah. He holds faculty appointments at the Stanford University School of Medicine and at several other universities. He was formerly VP and Chief Quality Officer at Intermountain Healthcare.
He has been honored with awards for quality in health care delivery, including (among many others): the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety & Quality Award – The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum, 2019; the Deming Cup – Columbia University School of Business, 2011; C. Jackson Grayson Medal, Distinguished Quality Pioneer – American Quality and Productivity Center, 2010; Joint Commission Earnest A. Codman Award, 2006; AHA HRET TRUST Award, 2005; National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Quality Award, 2005; and the American College of Medical Quality Founders’ Award, 1999.
For 8 out of its first 9 years, Dr. James was named among Modern Physician’s “50 Most Influential Physician Executives in Healthcare.” In Modern Healthcare, he was named among the “100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare” and “25 Top Clinical Informaticists.”
About Amplifire Healthcare Alliance
The Amplifire Healthcare Alliance is an expanding group of leading healthcare organizations that are collaborating to transform care through clinical knowledge engineering. Members are united in identifying and remediating Confidently Held Misinformation™ and knowledge gaps among providers that cause avoidable harm and unreimbursed care, in order to elevate both clinical and financial performance.