MITSS is proud to present an exciting line-up of speakers for this year’s event. Our opening remarks will be provided by a respected hospital CEO, known for her courage and humanity in the settlement of a major lawsuit and the resulting establishment of a patient safety foundation. Our Keynote is a nationally recognized physician, television journalist, and best selling author. We will hear from our distinguished Co-Chairs. And, our Executive Director, Linda Kenney, will highlight this past year’s accomplishments while putting forth our strategic goals for 2012. Our speakers are certain to inspire and ignite the spark of change long after the event comes to an end!

OPENING REMARKS
Sandra Coletta
President & CEO, Kent Hospital, Rhode Island

Mrs. Coletta has been the President and CEO of Kent Hospital since October 2008. Kent Hospital is part of Care New England, a health care system that owns three hospitals and a home care agency. Kent Hospital is a 359-bed; nonprofit, acute care hospital serving approximately 300,000 residents of central Rhode Island.

An advocate for patient safety, Mrs. Coletta has been acknowledged for the settlement of a major public lawsuit brought by the actor James Woods on behalf of his brother Michael Woods.  A component of the settlement was the establishment of the Michael J. Woods Institute at Kent Hospital which is redesigning the care delivery process from a human factors engineering perspective.  Her experiences were recently published in the second edition of Using Human Factors Engineering to Improve Patient Safety.

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KEYNOTE
Dr. Nancy Snyderman
NBC News Chief Medical Editor

Dr. Nancy Snyderman joined NBC News as the Chief Medical Editor in September 2006. Her reports appear on “Today,” “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “Dateline NBC,” MSNBC, and MSNBC.com.   Snyderman has reported on wide-ranging topics affecting society and has traveled the world extensively, reporting from many of the world's most troubled areas.  Snyderman also serves as the Medial Director of GE’s healthymagination initiative and serves on the board of directors of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. She is on staff in the Department of the Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania.

Snyderman’s medical work has been widely published in peer review journals and she is the recipient of numerous research grants.   She was awarded a Kellogg fellowship in 1987.  She has also been recognized in broadcasting with Emmy, DuPont, and Gracie awards.  She is a New York Times bestselling author, having written five books: “Dr Nancy Snyderman's Guide to Good Health for Women Over Forty,” “Necessary Journeys,” “Girl in the Mirror: Mothers and Daughters in the Years of Adolescence,” “Diet Myths That Keep Us Fat,” and “Medical Myths That Can Kill You.”

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EVENT CO-CHAIR
Helen Haskell
President, Mothers Against Medical Error
Director, The Empowered Patient Coalition

Helen Haskell is president of the patient advocacy group Mothers Against Medical Error and co-director of the nonprofit educational organization Empowered Patient Coalition. For Helen, patient safety is a calling to which she was brought by the medical error death of her young son Lewis in a South Carolina hospital in November, 2000.  Following her son’s death, Helen helped put together a coalition of patients, policymakers, and healthcare providers to pass the Lewis Blackman Patient Safety Act, the first of several South Carolina legislative initiatives addressing healthcare safety and transparency.  In 2007, the state of South Carolina created the Lewis Blackman Chair of Patient Safety and Clinical Effectiveness, an endowed professorship named in honor of her deceased son. 

Helen is actively involved in patient safety and quality improvement efforts in South Carolina, the United States, and internationally on topics including medical education reform, patient-activated rapid response, infection prevention, medical error disclosure, and patient empowerment and education.  She is a member of the AHRQ National Advisory Council, a board member of Consumers Advancing Patient Safety and the Nursing Alliance for Quality Care, and was recently named to the board of directors of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.  She is featured in the award-winning Transparent learning patient safety video The Lewis Blackman Story and is co-author, with Julia Hallisy, of numerous patient educational materials including The Empowered Patient Guide to Hospital Care for Patients and Families

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EVENT CO-CHAIR
Keith A. Hovan
President & Chief Executive Officer
Southcoast Health System, Inc.
Southcoast Hospitals Group, Inc.

Keith A. Hovan is President and Chief Executive Officer of Southcoast Health System, Inc. and Southcoast Hospitals Group, Inc., a subsidiary of Southcoast Health System.  The hospitals group is comprised of Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River, MA, St. Luke’s Hospital in New Bedford, MA and Tobey Hospital in Wareham, MA.

Keith was appointed President and CEO of Southcoast Hospitals Group, Inc. in July 2008 and in July 2011 as President and CEO of Southcoast Health System, Inc.  Previously, Keith served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Danbury Health Systems since December 2001.  He holds a Master of Science degree in Nursing from Sacred Heart University (graduating first in his class with an Award for Academic Excellence), and is a member of several professional associations. Keith has been awarded numerous honors over his career, including the Margaret Cinchack Award for Excellence in Clinical Nursing, Alpha Sigma Lambda National Honor Society, and the 1990 Emergency Nurses Association Nurse Manager of the Year Award.

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EVENT CO-CHAIR
Albert W. Wu, M.D., MPH
Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Albert W. Wu is a practicing internist and Professor of Health Policy and Management and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he is director of the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research, and the DEcIDE center for comparative effectiveness research.  He received BA and MD degrees from Cornell University, and completed Internal Medicine residency at the Mount Sinai Hospital and UC San Diego.  He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at UCSF and received an MPH from UC Berkeley.  His research and teaching focus on patient outcomes and quality of care.  He has studied the handling of medical errors since 1998, and has published influential papers including “Do house officers learn from their mistakes” in JAMA in 1991, and “Medical error: the second victim” in the BMJ.  He has over 300 published papers and developed an award-winning educational video on disclosure “Removing insult from injury: disclosing adverse events.”   He was a member of the Institute of Medicine committee on identifying and preventing medication errors, and was Senior Adviser for Patient Safety to WHO in Geneva.  He is editor of the “The Value of Close Calls in Improving Patient Safety,” released by the Joint Commission in 2011, and teaches a series of courses on measurement, quality of care and patient safety.

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EVENT HOST
Linda Kenney
President & Executive Director, MITSS

Linda Kenney founded MITSS in 2002 as the result of a personal experience with an adverse medical event, when she identified the need for support services in cases of adverse events and outlined an agenda for change. Since that time, she has been a tireless activist for patient, family, and clinician rights. She has become a nationally and internationally recognized leader in the patient safety movement and speaks regularly at healthcare conferences and forums. In 2006, Linda was the first consumer graduate of the prestigious HRET/AHA Patient Leadership Fellowship. That same year, she was the recipient of the National Patient Safety Foundation’s esteemed Socius Award, an annual award given in recognition of effective partnering in pursuit of patient safety. She has authored and contributed to a number of publications on topics including the emotional impact of adverse events on patients, families, and clinicians. Linda serves on the boards of the National Patient Safety Foundation and Planetree.

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