Becker’s Hospital Review Recognizes Three NYC Health + Hospitals Leaders as “Patient Safety Experts to Know”

Becker's Hospital Review Recognizes Three NYC Health + Hospitals Leaders as "Patient Safety Experts to Know"

NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi and North Central Bronx Chief Quality Officer Komal Bajaj, MD; NYC Health + Hospitals/Metropolitan Patient Safety Officer Samrina Kahlon, MD; and NYC Health + Hospitals Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer Eric Wei, MD are recognized

Jul 03, 2024

NYC Health + Hospitals today announced that NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi and North Central Bronx Chief Quality Officer Komal Bajaj, MD, NYC Health + Hospitals/Metropolitan Patient Safety Officer Samrina Kahlon, MD, and NYC Health + Hospitals Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer Eric Wei, MD, are recognized by Becker's Hospital Review on the "90 Patient Safety Experts to Know" list for 2024. The Chief Quality Officers and Patient Safety Officers from the health system are patient safety leaders and are skilled practitioners of patient harm reduction, disease management and disaster preparedness. They are innovators advocating for improving health care processes and transforming safety standards, ensuring NYC Health + Hospitals continues to be a leader in patient safety. Becker's Hospital Review is an industry publication focused on hospital business news for health care decision makers.

As Chief Quality Officer, Dr. Bajaj leads quality and safety transformations at NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi and North Central Bronx (NCB), serving nearly a million Bronx residents. Overseeing two acute care facilities with more than 700 beds, she drives improvements in clinical performance across outpatient, inpatient, emergency and telehealth services. Dr. Bajaj is an expert in integrating equity with health care quality and safety, health care environmental sustainability and maternal health diagnostic safety. She merged the quality and safety programs at Jacobi and NCB into a single high-performing entity and introduced "Success Cause Analysis" to enhance psychological safety and staff engagement. Her work, featured in major media and health care publications, includes the widely adopted PEARLS Health care Debriefing Tool. Dr. Bajaj also mentors emerging leaders and has implemented a decarbonization strategy within the quality assurance plan, achieving significant greenhouse gas reductions.

Dr. Kahlon leads the vision, strategy and implementation of patient safety activities across her hospital. She is key in mentoring and sponsoring patient safety projects, preparing an annual patient safety plan and reviewing national patient safety goals as well as incidents within the hospital. During her tenure, she developed a training program for staff physicians to improve patient safety and quality of care. She is also the editor-in-chief of Urban Medicine Journal of Quality Improvement and Patient Safety.

Dr. Wei serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer for NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest municipal safety-net health system in the United States, serving over 1.3 million New Yorkers every year. He has created a multiprong strategy for transforming quality and safety through fostering a culture of safety, building internal quality improvement capacity, aligning improvement activities with system strategic pillars, and becoming a data-informed organization through a novel data and analytics strategy. He is a Professor of Emergency Medicine in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai and Adjunct Professor in the NYU School of Global Public Health. He is the fellowship director for the NYC Health + Hospitals Clinical Leadership Fellowship. He is a practicing Emergency Medicine physician who has rotated through all 11 Emergency Departments in the system. He serves on the board of MetroPlusHealth and as faculty for the Greater New York Hospital Association/United Hospital Fund Clinical Quality Fellowship Program. He is a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

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About NYC Health + Hospitals
NYC Health + Hospitals is the largest municipal health care system in the nation serving more than a million New Yorkers annually in more than 70 patient care locations across the city's five boroughs. A robust network of outpatient, neighborhood-based primary and specialty care centers anchors care coordination with the system's trauma centers, nursing homes, post-acute care centers, home care agency, and MetroPlus health plan-all supported by 11 essential hospitals. Its diverse workforce of more than 43,000 employees is uniquely focused on empowering New Yorkers, without exception, to live the healthiest life possible. For more information, visit www.nychealthandhospitals.org and stay connected on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

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