Dr. Terry Fairbanks Wins John Eisenberg Award

Rollin J. “Terry” Fairbanks, MD, MS, never expected that a childhood in upstate New York, years as a paramedic, and a curiosity for how systems work would one day converge to shape a new frontier in healthcare safety.

Today, as senior vice president and chief quality and safety officer at MedStar Health, Dr. Fairbanks is recognized as a pioneer in bringing human factors engineering and a discipline rooted in aviation, transportation, and nuclear safety into health care.

This year, the Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum honored Dr. Fairbanks, a physician and safety scientist, with the 2025 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award for Individual Achievement, celebrating his lifetime of innovation, leadership, and measurable impact on healthcare quality and safety.

Dr. Fairbanks’s journey began in the small towns of northern New York, where his mother led a nonprofit healthcare organization and his father taught English.

“My father taught me how to write and my mother taught me about leadership and influence,” Fairbanks reflected. “Those became the most important skills in my career.”

Dr. Fairbanks’ path to his current role was winding and non-traditional.

While studying math and physics at SUNY Potsdam, he worked as an EMT and paramedic, gaining early exposure to how systems and, sometimes, their failures, affect patient outcomes. He received his bachelor’s degree there and completed an EMT-P certification.

Later, while pursuing a master’s degree in industrial systems and human factors engineering at Virginia Tech, he began applying engineering principles to safety. His early research focused on transportation and nuclear industries, but he quickly recognized a startling contrast: health care, despite being just as complex and high-risk, lacked the safety engineering rigor found in other sectors. After completing his master’s degree, he attended the Viriginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine in 2000, completing his emergency medicine residency at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

He would go on to hold roles in EMS medical direction after medical school, giving him frontline exposure to the complexity and risks inherent in acute care systems. Over time, he realized that many of the adverse events he witnessed were not due to individual failure but to system design, cognitive overload, and human–machine interactions.

“Health care often asks doctors or nurses to fix safety problems without training in safety science,” he said. “In any other industry, we’d call in engineers. You wouldn’t ask a physician to design a bridge.”

After graduating in 2000, he began work at the University of Rochester Medical Center, starting as an emergency medicine resident. Over a decade there, he would move through the ranks as emergency medicine chief resident, assistant professor of emergency medicine, and director for its patient safety research at the Simulation Center for Medical Education and Patient Safety.

In 2010, he became a professor at Georgetown University School of Medine and an attending emergency physician at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, where he still currently works.

In 2010, Dr. Fairbanks also merged his twin passions, safety engineering and medicine, by founding the MedStar National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare to bridge clinical and engineering disciplines and accelerate the adoption of safety science in healthcare delivery. Eight years later, Dr. Fairbanks handed off the leadership of the center to Dr. Raj Ratwani. As a result of their leadership, the Center has grown into a center of applied research, consulting, usability testing, and training. The Center grew to over 20 associates at its peak, with more than 30 ongoing research studies, and 47 annual research publications. It has influenced clinical systems not only in the U.S. but also in Spain, Australia, and the U.K.

The Center became one of the first of its kind to formally integrate safety scientists with clinicians. Under the leadership of Dr. Fairbanks and his colleagues, it grew from a small team to a leading research and consulting hub with more than two dozen associates, multiple ongoing studies, and international influence. Dr. Fairbanks and his colleagues helped develop innovative tools, such as RCA² (Root Cause Analyses & Actions) and the CANDOR (Communication and Optimal Resolution) toolkits, are now embedded in event review and safety improvement efforts across the country.

“Our focus is on designing for human strengths and limitations,” Fairbanks said. “When something goes wrong, we don’t blame individuals, we look at how the system can be made more resilient.”

At MedStar Health, he has guided safety strategies with measurable outcomes, leading system-wide improvements in mortality, safety culture measures, adverse event rates, and clinical outcomes across multiple settings.

He emphasizes transparency and empathy when things go wrong: “We sit down with patients and families, talk openly, and help them through the process. That’s how you build trust and truly learn.”

A hallmark of Fairbanks’s leadership is his deep commitment to mentorship. At MedStar and beyond, he has trained dozens of safety scientists and clinicians who now lead their own programs around the world.

“I believe in finding great people, helping them succeed, and getting out of their way,” he said. “Collaboration always trumps competition. The real joy of mentorship is seeing others rise.”

This servant-leadership philosophy has created a lasting ripple effect in patient safety, cultivating a generation of leaders who share his systems-based, human-centered approach.

Beyond his institutional roles, Dr. Fairbanks engages broadly at the national and international levels. He has served on advisory boards for the National Patient Safety Foundation, UK Health IT Advisory Committee, and governments in the U.S., Spain, Australia, and the U.K. He is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Board on Human-Systems Integration. He also holds a faculty position with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and has been recognized repeatedly by Becker’s Hospital Review as one of the top experts in patient safety.

For Dr. Fairbanks, receiving the Eisenberg Award is both an honor and a chance to continue evolving the field. “This recognition isn’t a culmination, it's motivation to keep going,” he said. “Health care is changing fast with AI, digital transformation, and growing complexity. Human factors engineering will be central to keeping care safe, equitable, and adaptive.”

He encourages future clinicians and engineers alike to adopt safety thinking early. “The next generation will shape how we design systems for safety,” he noted. “If we get that right, we won’t just prevent harm, we'll create healthcare systems that truly learn, adapt, and care for everyone involved.”

Fairbanks credits the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) as a “shining light” in advancing safety, and he praised President and CEO Karen Wolk Feinstein, PhD, for her innovative and collaborative approach and commitment to pushing health care beyond traditional boundaries.

“Karen and JHF have done some of the smartest, most forward-thinking innovative work in patient safety,” he said. “Their vision and advocacy are unmatched, and I have deep respect for how they continue to drive the field forward.”