Speakers

Mark R. Chassin, MD, FACP, MPP, MPH, is president and chief executive officer of The Joint Commission. In this role, he oversees the activities of the nation’s predominant standards-setting and accrediting body in health care. Joint Commission accreditation and certification is recognized worldwide as a symbol of quality that reflects an organization’s commitment to quality improvement and to meeting state-of-the-art performance standards.

Dr. Chassin is also president of the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare. Established in 2009 under Dr. Chassin’s leadership, the Center works with the nation’s leading hospitals and health systems to address health care’s most critical safety and quality problems such as health care-associated infection (HAI), hand-off communications, wrong site surgery, surgical site infections, and preventing avoidable heart failure hospitalizations. The Center is developing solutions through the application of the same Robust Process Improvement™ (RPI) methods and tools that other industries rely on to improve quality, safety and efficiency. In keeping with its objective to transform health care into a high reliability industry, The Joint Commission will share these proven effective solutions with the more than 20,000 health care organizations and programs it accredits and certifies.

Previously, Dr. Chassin was the Edmond A. Guggenheim Professor of Health Policy and founding Chairman of the Department of Health Policy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, and Executive Vice President for Excellence in Patient Care at The Mount Sinai Medical Center. Before coming to Mount Sinai, Dr. Chassin served as Commissioner of the New York State Department of Health. He is a board-certified internist and practiced emergency medicine for 12 years. His background also includes service in the federal government and many years of health services and health policy research.

While at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Dr. Chassin built a nationally recognized quality improvement program. The focus of the program was on achieving substantial gains in all aspects of quality of care, encompassing safety, clinical outcomes, the experiences of patients and families, and the working environment of caregivers. This initiative was a combined effort of The Mount Sinai Hospital and The Mount Sinai School of Medicine and aimed to create models of world-class excellence that produce major, measurable, and sustainable improvements in all of these vital dimensions of patient care. Dr. Chassin’s research during his 12 years at Mount Sinai focused on developing health care quality measures; using those measures in quality improvement; understanding the relationship of quality measurement and improvement to health policy. In addition, he used his experience in quality measurement and improvement to design and deploy a number of effective community-based intervention trials that reduced racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care.

Dr. Chassin has been recognized for his contributions to the fields of quality measurement and improvement with several honors. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and was selected in the first group of honorees as a lifetime member of the National Associates of the National Academies, a new program which recognizes career contributions. In addition, Dr. Chassin was a member of the IOM committee that authored “To Err is Human” and “Crossing the Quality Chasm.” He is a recipient of the Founders’ Award of the American College of Medical Quality and the Ellwood Individual Award of the Foundation for Accountability.

Dr. Chassin received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University and a master’s degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He also holds a master’s degree in public health from the University of California at Los Angeles.