Healthcare Alliance Discussion series with Rear Adm. Bruce Gillingham, MD

Former Geisinger President and CEO, Glenn D. Steele Jr., MD, PhD, Joins Amplifire as a Strategic Advisor

Boulder, Colorado, Nov 15, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Knowledge Factor, Inc. (“Amplifire”), the leading adaptive eLearning and content creation platform leveraging advances in brain science, and sponsor of the Healthcare Alliance, welcomes Dr. Glenn Steele to its Strategic Advisory Board. Amplifire benefits from Dr. Steele’s extensive clinical knowledge and leadership experience in the healthcare sector, which will help steer the ongoing expansion of the Healthcare Alliance, the Amplifire-founded collaborative network of over 25 leading U.S. health systems.

With his breadth of experience — first and foremost a surgeon and later as a dynamic leader in the industry — Dr. Steele brings unwavering dedication to excellence in health system operations and workforce development, balancing financial and clinical priorities during challenging times. Dr. Steele will play a vital role with Amplifire in providing tools to help shape behaviors and practices within health systems to create a positive impact on clinician well-being and patient outcomes. His joining the Strategic Advisory Board marks Amplifire’s commitment to bringing the brightest, most innovative minds together to empower health systems to achieve their goals during this pivotal time.

In his 14 years as President and CEO, Dr. Steele led Geisinger as the benchmark of high reliability systems, marked by exceptional integration between hospitals and physicians, advanced information technology, and an unwavering emphasis on quality. From 2013-2018, Dr. Steele was Chairman of xG Health, a Geisinger-affiliated consultancy designed to spread the organization’s principles across the U.S. healthcare system.

“Amplifire is humbled to welcome Dr. Glenn Steele to our team, and we are excited to have him on board as growth of the Healthcare Alliance accelerates,” says Dr. Bryan Bushick, General Manager, Healthcare Alliance, and Amplifire’s Chief Healthcare Innovation Officer. “A recognized leader in quality, innovation and population health, Dr. Steele will be a driving force as Amplifire expands its impact.  His direct counsel in our efforts is of very high value.”

“Amplifire’s innovative business model and utilization of advanced brain science-based learning techniques hold the solution to the challenges many health systems currently face. As an advisor, I am motivated by a profound desire to enhance healthcare, by bringing about behavior change that leads to systemic excellence,” shares Dr. Steele. “It’s a privilege to have a hand guiding a company that is shaping the future of healthcare, and I am excited to contribute to meaningful work that positively impacts countless lives.”

His professional background includes positions as Richard T. Crane Professorship in the Department of Surgery at the University of Chicago and William V. McDermott Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School among others. He also served as chairman of the American Board of Surgery. A prolific writer, Dr. Steele has authored/co-authored over 500 scientific and professional articles.

Dr. Steele is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He has also served on the National Advisory Committee for Rural Health, the Pennsylvania Cancer Control Consortium, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance’s Committee on Performance Measurement. He has received numerous awards, including the CEO IT Achievement Award by Modern Healthcare and Healthcare Information and Management System Society (HIMSS).

Dr. Steele received his bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard University and his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine. He completed his internship and residency in surgery at the University of Colorado and earned his Ph.D. in microbiology at Lund University in Sweden.

Former U.S. Navy Surgeon General Bruce Gillingham Joins Amplifire as a Strategic Advisor

Boulder, Colorado, Sept. 14, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Knowledge Factor, Inc. (“Amplifire”), the leading adaptive eLearning and content creation platform leveraging advances in brain science, and owner of the Healthcare Alliance, welcomes Dr. Bruce Gillingham to its Strategic Advisory Board. Gillingham will lend his expertise in healthcare innovation strategy and public service initiatives for the Healthcare Alliance, the Amplifire-founded collaborative consortium of over 25 leading U.S. health systems.

Gillingham’s partnership underscores Amplifire’s mission to revolutionize healthcare education and enhance patient care on a global scale. As the former 39th Surgeon General of the United States Navy, Gillingham recently retired from 40 years of active-duty service. During his tenure, he led approximately 44,000 Navy medical personnel through the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery’s (BUMED) most comprehensive transformation since World War II. Gillingham oversaw a shift in mission from oversight of military treatment facility-based care to expeditionary, operational support. Under his leadership, Navy Medicine provided the policy and guidance that ensured that the Navy and Marine Corps were able to operate around the globe continuously and safely during the pandemic. As one of the nation’s top minds in health operations, Gillingham gives Amplifire’s advisory board a critical edge.

“Bruce Gillingham’s integrity and reputation for establishing elite patient care in adverse environments is an invaluable resource to Amplifire in healthcare and beyond. His presence on our advisory board furthers our commitment to revolutionizing healthcare training, championing patient safety, bolstering public sector initiatives, and our overall public service agenda,” shared Bob Burgin, CEO of Amplifire. “It is a true honor to collaborate with Dr. Gillingham in our shared mission.”

“I’m thrilled to join the Amplifire team,” Bruce Gillingham expressed. “It’s readily apparent to me that those organizations which have adopted the Amplifire training platform have made demonstrable progress in improving staff performance at all levels. As a physician and healthcare executive, I see the Amplifire platform filling a critical gap in the crusade to eliminate preventable patient harm. I can’t wait to help expand the awareness and utilization of this paradigm shifting eLearning platform.”

During his career, Gillingham served throughout Navy Medicine as director of Pediatric Orthopedic and Scoliosis Surgery; Associate Orthopedic Residency Program director; and director of Surgical Services. He was the Officer in Charge of a Surgical/Shock Trauma Platoon that achieved 98% combat casualty survival during Operation Al Fajr, The Second Battle of Fallujah, in 2004. While assigned to Naval Medical Center San Diego, he was instrumental in establishing the Comprehensive Combat and Complex Casualty Care Center. He was in command at the hospital, medical center, and enterprise level.

Gillingham’s awards include the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit (eight awards), Meritorious Service Medal, Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (two awards), Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal with the Eagle Globe, and Anchor device with bronze star and the Fleet Marine Force ribbon.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology (with high honors) from the University of California, San Diego, and a Doctor of Medicine from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences where he is a Distinguished Professor of Military and Emergency Medicine. He is an inductee in the medical honor society of Alpha Omega Alpha and is a Certified Physician Executive.

About Amplifire
Amplifire is a next-generation learning platform with more than four billion learner interactions and is an innovator in high-stakes workforce training for critical roles. The platform harnesses advances in cognitive science to create personalized learning and drive successful outcomes. The platform’s adaptive algorithm guides learners to mastery across healthcare, government, military, food service, corporate, and education segments, providing unique learner analytics that offer valuable learner insights.

Dr. Brent James to Chair the Clinical Innovation Advisory Board of the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance

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.