22nd Patient Safety Fellowship Launches to Help Reimagine the Future of Health Care
Type: News
Focus Area: Workforce Development
Karen Feinstein welcomes fellows and highlights the Foundation’s sustained focus on patient safety.
What would health care look like if safety was designed into every interaction, decision, and technology from the start—not addressed only after harm occurs?
That question will guide the 22nd annual Patient Safety Fellowship, which launched on May 26 with 26 fellows from 11 universities and 16 fields of study gathering in Pittsburgh to help reimagine the future of healthcare safety. Hosted by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF), Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI), and Health Careers Futures, this year’s Fellowship challenges participants to help advance the blueprint for an “Ambition Health System”—an ideal yet feasible health system designed to prevent harm before it happens.
This year’s Fellowship is informed by the work of the Coalition for Advancing Safter Healthcare (CASH), a national initiative working to conceptualize the health system of the future through multidisciplinary collaboration and innovation. CASH focuses on four strategic areas critical to advancing safer care: Large-Scale Health System Technology, Human Factors Solutions, Data for Improvement, and Direct-to-Consumer Technology.
The initiative brings together four nationally celebrated leaders in patient safety, all of whom will be participating as guest faculty and lecturers in this summer’s fellowship, Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, UC San Diego Health Joan & Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation, and the University of Utah Center for Evaluation of Health AI Research.
This year’s fellowship welcomes 26 participants from 11 universities.
Throughout the summer, fellows will engage directly with experts helping shape Ambition Health System and explore how AI-enabled systems, human-centered design, and real-time data can improve clinical decision-making, support the healthcare workforce, and empower patients as active participants in their care.
Representing disciplines including medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, health administration, communications, artificial intelligence, social work, and health informatics, fellows will work in interdisciplinary teams to develop future-state scenarios for key healthcare stakeholders, including nurses, physicians, patients, health system executives, and board members. Their work will examine how experiences within the healthcare system could be transformed through systems intentionally designed around safety, prevention, and reliability.
The Fellowship will culminate in a final showcase in late July, where teams will present “day in the life” narratives illustrating how an Ambition Health System could improve safety, care experiences, and outcomes across the healthcare ecosystem.
For more than two decades, the Patient Safety Fellowship has introduced emerging leaders to the challenges and opportunities shaping safer healthcare systems. This year’s program continues that tradition while connecting fellows to a growing national movement working to redesign health care around one central goal: preventing harm before it occurs.
