Scientist profiles S-Z

Education:

• Hon. B.Sc., 1990, biochemistry, University of Manitoba, Canada
• MD, 1994, medicine, University of Manitoba, Canada
• Internship, 1995, internal medicine, University of British Columbia Teaching Hospitals, Canada
• Residency, 1998, internal medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard University, U.S.
• Hospitalist fellowship, 2000, University of California, San Francisco, U.S.

Appointments and Affiliations:

• Scientist, Evaluative Clinical Sciences, Integrated Community Research Program, Sunnybrook Research Institute
• Vice-chair, quality and innovation, department of medicine, U of T
• Senior scholar, U of T Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety
• Full professor, department of medicine, U of T
• Adjunct faculty, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, U of T
• Staff physician, general internal medicine, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
  

Research Foci:

• Patient safety
• Quality improvement and knowledge translation
• Evidence synthesis (systematic reviews and meta-analyses)

Research Summary:

Dr. Shojania's research has focused on identifying effective patient safety strategies and achieving improved healthcare quality more generally. He has over 175 publications indexed in Medline, including in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), among other leading journals. Google Scholar lists over 20,000 citations to his work with an h-index of 68. Dr. Shojania has also twice delivered presentations on patient safety and quality improvement to the U.S. Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine).

Dr. Shojania obtained his undergraduate medical training at the University of Manitoba in Canada, followed by an internship at the University of British Columbia and residency training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard University) in Boston. From 1998-2000, he was the first fellow in hospital medicine at the University of California San Francisco —and the first such ‘hospitalist fellow’ in the US. Hospital medicine has since grown to become the second largest subspecialty of internal medicine, after cardiology. During this fellowship Dr. Shojania had subsequent faculty appointments at UCSF (2000-2004) and he began his focus on patient safety and healthcare quality more broadly.

Dr. Shojania returned to Canada — first to the University of Ottawa, where he held a Canada Research Chair in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety. He then moved to Toronto in 2008, where he established the Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (CQuIPS), an extra departmental unit (EDU) funded by the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and two of its major teaching hospitals. From 2009 to 2019, he grew the centre from a team of just four people to 28 staff and core members, who published over 500 peer review papers and obtained approximately $50M in contracts and grants. The centre has also developed widely successful, award-winning education programs which have produced over 1000 graduates.

As vice chair for Quality & Innovation in the University of Toronto’s Department of Medicine, Dr. Shojania developed a new academic career track for faculty members called Clinicians in Quality & Innovation. This novel academic job description grew out of ideas he had articulated in a JAMA commentary he had co-authored a few years earlier. This role has grown from having four faculty members in 2012 to over 80 faculty in 2022.

Dr. Shojania’s research has focused on identifying and further developing effective strategies for achieving improved healthcare quality. He was an early advocate for applying more rigorous approaches to evaluating improvement interventions, a perspective he brought to his role as editor-in-chief (and then co-editor-in-chief with Prof Mary Dixon-Woods) at BMJ Quality & Safety from 2011-2020. During this period, the journal’s impact factor rose from under two to over seven, so that it now has the second highest impact among the 90+ journals covering not just health care quality and safety, but also all of health services research, clinical informatics, health policy, among other topics.

More recently, Dr. Shojania has become interested in applying the methods of quality improvement to efforts to address the social determinants of health and to prepare the healthcare system for the impacts of the climate crisis. He remains clinically active as a hospital-based general internist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

Selected Publications:

See current publications list at PubMed.

1. Shojania KG. What problems in health care quality should we target as the world burns around us? CMAJ. 2022 Feb 28;194(8):E311-E312. doi: 10.1503/cmaj.220134. Listen to related podcast episode.
2. Shojania KG. Incident Reporting Systems: What Will It Take to Make Them Less Frustrating and Achieve Anything Useful? Jt Comm J Qual Saf. 2021. Published online 12-Oct-2021 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcjq.2021.10.001 
3. Miller FA, Young SB, Dobrow M, Shojania KG. Vulnerability of the medical product supply chain: the wake-up call of COVID-19. BMJ Qual Saf. 2021 Apr;30(4):331-335. doi: 10.1136/bmjqs-2020-012133. Epub 2020 Nov 2.
4. Shojania K. Making the social determinants of health the focus for healthcare improvement efforts. BMJ Opinion November 20, 2020 https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/11/20/making-social-determinants-of-health-the-focus-for-healthcare-improvement-efforts/ 
5. Boozary AS, Shojania KG. Pathology of poverty: the need for quality improvement efforts to address social determinants of health. BMJ Qual Saf. 2018;27(6):421-424
6. Gandhi TK, Berwick DM, Shojania KG. Patient Safety at the Crossroads. JAMA. 2016 May 3;315(17):1829–30 

Related News and Stories:

• Q&A: Dr. Kaveh Shojania (SRI Magazine, 2009)
• Director of the Centre for Patient Safety Appointed: SRI scientist appointed as inaugural director of the new University of Toronto Centre for Patient Safety (Jan. 15, 2009)

Related Links:

• Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety
• U of T profile, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation