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Our Vision:

Zero Harm and Excellence in Patient Care.

Our Mission:

Researching, teaching, and developing the infrastructure and culture of high reliability and wellbeing

Our Values:

Respect & Trust, Results-Oriented, Honesty & Integrity, Supportive & Caring Environment (Empathy, Kindness, and Compassion)


What We Do:

Zero Harm — Lean and High-Reliability Thinking

We believe in Zero Harm — via Lean and High-Reliability thinking. Some concepts we use include a hierarchy of effectiveness, search for simplicity, acceptance of complexity and drift, transparency, visual management, and standard work.

Incident Reporting, Huddles, and Gemba Walks

Just like high-reliability industries (e.g., banking, aviation, nuclear power, oil, and gas), we believe in incident learning systems, daily huddles, and ‘Gemba’ walks that enable organizations to continually and sustainably improve their systems.

A3 problem solving

We believe in A3 thinking to solve problems. A3 is a visual manifestation of a structured problem and continuous improvement approach. The name A3 refers to a single sheet of ISO A3 sized paper which is typically used in such a project.


Our Main Research Interests:

Transformation of Healthcare Professionals to Safety Mindfulness and Wellness

Providers’ engagement with patient safety and continuous improvement efforts are of most importance to healthcare organizations.  Over the last decade, our work has led to the development of models of individual transformation to safety mindfulness (or in other words, the individual engaging in proactive and prospective (vs. reactive and retrospective) incident reporting and problem-solving; while maintaining overall wellness). Our work in this area focuses on the implementation and assessment of improvement programs, methods, tools, and technology aimed at increasing safety mindfulness, and wellness of healthcare providers.

Human Factors Engineering

Care delivery is done in complex and stressful environments. Workers often need to perform multiple tasks concurrently while being subjected to many hand-offs and cross-coverage situations. To better understand such circumstances, we have created a human-factors laboratory where we have been investigating contributing factors and root-causes of patient safety events.


Our People: