Lifelong Activist Marty Hatlie Elevates Patient Voice as a Catalyst for Change
Type: News
Focus Area: Patient Safety
Martin “Marty” Hatlie is a patient safety advocate with a strong interest in the roles patients and family members play as co-creators of patient safety solutions.
Marty Hatlie’s journey as a champion for patient safety and justice is deeply influenced by the values forged in his family: fairness, justice, and the importance of lifelong learning. Originally from Wahpeton, North Dakota, where the closest hospital was across the border in Minnesota, Hatlie’s father was an FBI agent and then a prosecutor; his mother was a teacher; and his grandfather was the county sheriff and then a judge.
“My parents really wanted to make the world a better place, and I think they instilled that in their kids,” Hatlie said. “That still motivates me.”
This early foundation, combined with a strong academic background—a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Carleton College and a Juris Doctorate from Boston College Law School—has shaped Hatlie’s career and lifelong mission.
He began his professional path as a litigator, practicing in civil rights and medical liability defense, with bar licenses in both Illinois and Massachusetts. He became disillusioned witnessing first-hand how haphazardly the litigation system works. “I was shocked the first time I heard a lawyer lie to a judge, then quickly realized it wasn’t uncommon. The rhetoric is about justice, but the goal in litigation is winning, not fairness, and certainly not learning.”
His work eventually led him to the American Medical Association, where he served as a lead tort reform strategist in the 1980s and 1990s, a banner issue for physicians and hospitals at the time. His commitment to patient safety grew from interest in alternative dispute resolution. In 1997, he coordinated the AMA’s launch of the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF), serving as its founding executive director through 1999. This experience set the stage for his increasing interest in the roles patients and families play in healthcare policy.
“Two years after we established the NPSF, we were picketed by victims’ rights groups from across the United States. We invited them in to talk, and as we listened, I remember being struck by how much we had to learn from them,” Hatlie said. “My Board of Directors was prestigious, the leading lights in the field, yet I was hearing things from patients and families that I wasn’t hearing from experts, researchers, and policymakers.”
Some of the issues the picketers brought to the forefront during their conversation with Hatlie were coordination of care lapses, failure to diagnose, failure to rescue—all issues that weren’t yet on the radar of experts, who were very focused on hospital care.
As the president and CEO of Project Patient Care, Hatlie continued his advocacy by leading efforts to use the voice of the patient to improve care, first in the Chicagoland area and then nationwide in multiple improvement projects funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. In addition, he served as co-director of the MedStar Institute for Quality & Safety, where be helped establish patient and family advisory councils focused on quality and safety that were embedded in the MedStar system’s high-reliability journey. He also contributed to MedStar’s work on open and honest communication, as a pilot site for the development of the AHRQ CANDOR (Communication and Optimal Resolution) program.
Since then, Hatlie’s influence has extended far beyond the legal realm. He is a founding member of Patients for Patient Safety US, an organization aligned with the World Health Organization (WHO) that seeks to improve healthcare safety across the United States. The group, composed of individuals affected by medical errors as well as civic/ governmental and healthcare partners, is dedicated to implementing the WHO's Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021–2030, with the goal of achieving zero harm in health care.
Hatlie’s leadership role including having served on various boards, including The Leapfrog Group, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation, Loyola MacNeal Hospital, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Certification of Professionals in Patient Safety affiliate. He’s served on numerous advisory boards, at the The Joint Commission, AHRQ, the National Quality Forum and WHO, among others. His expertise continues to be sought in U.S. federal health system transformation efforts.
Advocating for patient and family engagement, transparency, and accountability in health care for almost 30 years, Hatlie is dismayed by how slow change is.
“There’s an old canard in health care that it takes a generation to effect change. We’re past that and still too stuck in the old paradigm of deny and defend, hiding harm, and blaming individuals when things go wrong. In Hatlie’s view, the punitive nature of the U.S. legal system, combined with the federal–state divide, also hinders progress in patient safety. “System-wide learning depends on transparency. We still have big forces fighting transparency because they feel they are going to be sued, blamed, embarrassed, or lose money and status. That keeps us from making large scale change.”
However, he has seen examples of leadership producing progress. Traveling with Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) leadership on a study tour to Norway and Finland, Hatlie observed firsthand how national leaders there made patient safety and harm reduction in health care a priority, reflecting a culture of social responsibility and resulting in Norway being ranked at the top of the Imperial College London Institute of Global Health Innovation’s 2023 Global State of Patient Safety.
In contrast, he points out the lack of national surveillance in the United States and the failure to measure preventable harm as additional improvement barriers. “For 25-plus years we’ve relied on a voluntary, public–private partnership approach to safety, and it is just not working. We need more effective national policy, measurement and oversight. I think those are the main things I've learned on this long journey,” he said.
For Hatlie, real improvement in patient safety requires overcoming these systemic barriers and embracing the experience of patients as critical to reform. He also emphasizes that addressing health equity alongside patient safety is essential, as achieving zero harm will require attention to both, as certain groups disproportionately experience avoidable harms in health care.
Hatlie has been a long-time friend of the Foundation and is a strong supporter of the National Patient Safety Board Advocacy Coalition because of its ability to leverage predictive analytics and data to reduce harm in health care by learning from patient safety events. He applauds innovations like those showcased in the film The Pitch, which explores the potential of predictive analytics to save lives while also jumpstarting ethical questions around artificial intelligence in healthcare.
“What I like about [JHF President and CEO] Karen [Feinstein] is her unwavering commitment to safety. Other organizations’ commitments to patient safety come and go but JHF continues to stay the course,” Hatlie said. “I also like Karen’s directness. You always know where you stand, and she calls it as she sees it. That’s a valuable leadership quality that I appreciate.”