Speaker Category: Culture of Safety Panel

Dr. Betzelos develops and participates in physician engagement/clinical integration strategies, process improvement of quality initiatives, clinical care coordination/variation reduction, effectiveness of care and transitional care programs along the care continuum. Dr. Betzelos’ duties include oversight of the delivery of care at Fairfax Medical Campus through effective collaboration with Medical Staff Leaders, and management of Quality, Patient Safety, Informatics, Pharmacy, Case Management and Credentialing. Dr. Betzelos has also been instrumental in influencing the medical staff and IFMC leadership team to adopt High Reliability Science elements as the strategic methodology and approach to improve patient quality, safety and reduce human factor harm using TeamSTEPPS principles as the tactical tool to teach front-end providers.

Prior to joining Inova Fairfax Medical Campus, Dr. Betzelos was the SVP/Chief Quality Officer of a Clinically Integrated Network of a 12 hospital/100+ location Health System in the Midwest, Presence Healthcare.  Additionally, he was the executive leading Meaningful Use and Chief Quality Officer of Resurrection Health Care, a six-hospital Health System. Before this, he was the founder and President of Diversified Emergency Services LLC, a 200K+ annual patient volume multi-specialty Physician Management Organization that provided Emergency Physicians and Hospitalists to Hospitals. Concurrently, Dr. Betzelos was a founding member and owner of EMPAC RRG, a Medical Liability insurance company where he served as Chairman of the Board for 6 years. He is a past member of the Quality Board of Premier Inc., and actively serves on the Board of Directors of Right Spot Metric and the Medical Advisory Board of Vita-Heat Medical.

Dr. Betzelos holds a Bachelor’s of Science from Loyola University, a Medical Degree from The Chicago Medical School, a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Phoenix and a Masters of Science in Forensic Examination from Touro College and is a Six Sigma Black Belt and Master of TeamSTEPPS trainer. He is Board Certified in Emergency Medicine and is a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians. Dr. Betzelos is married to Dr. Elizabeth Theodosakis.

Dr. Conrad E. Müller, born in 1956, has been appointed as Director of the Klinik Hirslanden in Zurich in 2015. The Klinik Hirslanden is Switzerland’s largest private hospital and belongs to Hirslanden, the leading private clinic group in Switzerland. With its over 1’700 employees and 490 doctors, the Klinik Hirslanden offers a State-of-the-art medicine at university level coupled with a consistent focus on the patient. Before, Dr. Müller has been the CEO of the University Children’s Hospital of both Basel, an organization with 850 employees and a budget of 120 Million Swiss Francs per year. Besides his professional activities, Dr. Müller serves the community also in other ways. He is the Co-Founder and was the chairman of “AllKidS”, an organization to defend the economic interest of paediatric medicine in Switzerland. Furthermore, he was the first Director of Swisstransplant, the Swiss National Foundation for Organ Donation and Transplantation.

Craig Cordola serves as Senior Vice President and President of the Central/West Region for the Memorial Hermann Health System with overall responsibility for all ambulatory facilities within the region, as well as Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center (TMC), Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital, Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital, Memorial Hermann Rehabilitation Hospital-Katy, TIRR Memorial Hermann, Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center and the new campus being established, Memorial Hermann Cypress Hospital.

Prior to this role, Cordola served as Chief Executive Officer of the Memorial Hermann-TMC Campus – which includes Memorial Hermann-TMC, Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital, Memorial Hermann Heart & Vascular Institute-TMC and Memorial Hermann Mischer Neuroscience Institute at the TMC – for four and a half years. As a certified Level I trauma center at Memorial Hermann-TMC and Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital, the 865-bed Campus is also home to the Memorial Hermann Texas Trauma Institute and Memorial Hermann Life Flight, Houston’s only hospital-based air ambulance program serving surrounding communities within a 150-mile radius of the Texas Medical Center with a fleet of six state-of-the-art helicopters and worldwide using fixed-wing transport.

Cordola’s leadership and strategic direction were instrumental in the success of several key strategies, including unprecedented physician relations and strategic physician recruitment and retention, as well as programmatic development with a focus on growth, culture and expansion of services, both for the Memorial Hermann-TMC Campus and the Memorial Hermann Health System. Under his leadership, the Campus received its first UHC Quality Leadership Award in 2014, ranking Memorial Hermann-TMC among the top tier of all academic medical centers in the country.

Previously, Cordola worked as the Chief Executive Officer of Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital and, prior to that, served as the Assistant Vice President of Operations for the hospital where he provided leadership support for Children’s, Women’s, Volunteer Services, Chaplaincy and Food and Nutrition Services. Cordola’s accomplishments at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital included advances in quality and patient safety, as well as employee, patient and physician satisfaction.

Cordola serves on a number of local not-for-profit boards for organizations such as the Houston Technology Center and the Center for Houston’s Future. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives, currently serving as president of the organization’s Southeast Texas Chapter. In addition, Cordola serves on the Board of Managers for the University Health System Consortium, an organization of the leading academic medical centers across the country.

Cordola graduated with honors from The University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Psychology and continued his studies at University of Houston-Clear Lake, where he earned dual degrees with a Master of Healthcare Administration and a Master of Business Administration.

Cathie Furman, MHA, RN, is an executive faculty member at Virginia Mason Institute and a certified leader in the Virginia Mason Production System. At the institute’s training facility in Seattle and worldwide, she teaches health care executives and leaders how to use lean methods and tools to dramatically improve safety and quality. She also speaks frequently about the critical success factors of a patient safety program and how to implement management methods that improve patient safety. In her previous role, from 2001 to 2015, as the senior vice president of quality and compliance who was accountable for Virginia Mason’s strategic quality plan, Cathie traveled with her colleagues on their first trip to Japan to learn the benefits of using a lean management system. After returning to Seattle, she worked with the organization’s leaders, providers and staff to adapt the Toyota Production System to health care. She also created and implemented the Patient Safety Alert System^TM, a groundbreaking, sustainable method to engage all employees to report any incident or situation that could cause harm to a patient.

David Mayer, MD is the former Chief Executive Officer of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and remains a director on the governance board. Dr. Mayer is executive director of the MedStar Institute for Quality & Safety (MIQS). In this role, Dr. Mayer leads specific quality and safety programs in support of discovery, learning, and the application of innovative methods to operational clinical challenges.

Prior to his appointment as executive director, MIQS Dr. Mayer served for over six years as vice president, quality and safety for MedStar Health, overseeing the infrastructure for clinical quality and its operational efficiency for MedStar and each of its entities. Dr. Mayer also designs and directs systemwide activity for patient safety and risk reduction programs.

Dr. Mayer joined MedStar from the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago, Ill. Over the course of 10 years, he held numerous roles including co-executive director of the UIC Institute for Patient Safety Excellence, director of UIC Masters of Science Patient Safety Leadership Program, associate dean for Education, and associate chief medical officer for Quality and Safety Graduate Medical Education. Concurrent with his other roles, he served as vice chair for Quality and Safety for the Department of Anesthesiology, where he was an associate professor of Anesthesiology and director of Cardiac Anesthesiology. Dr. Mayer also founded and has led the Annual Telluride International Patient Safety Roundtable and Patient Safety Medical Student Summer Camp for the last thirteen years.

In addition, he has significant experience in the private sector as director of Medical Affairs of the Hospital Products Division of Abbott Laboratories and was president and founder of Esurg Corporation.

Dr. Mayer attended the University of Illinois at Chicago for both his undergraduate and medical degrees. He completed his internship and residency at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, followed by a fellowship in cardiac anesthesia. Additionally, he co-produced the patient safety educational film series titled “The Faces of Medical Error…From Tears to Transparency,” which won numerous awards including the prestigious Aegis Film Society Top Short Documentary Award.

Most recently, Dr. Mayer was listed on the Becker’s Hospital Review 2017 and 2018 lists of Top 50 people leading patient safety. He was one of four medical professionals presented with the 2017 Humanitarian Award from the Patient Safety Movement Foundation for his lifesaving achievements in patient safety. He was selected by the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua) as an International Quality and Safety Expert, has been presented with the 2013 Founders’ Award from the American College of Medical Quality, the University of Illinois/American Association of Medical Colleges Humanism in Medicine Award for his commitment to teaching, service and patient advocacy, and was recognized by the Institute of Medicine in Chicago in 2010 with the Sprague Patient Safety Award.

He regularly presents and writes on topics related to quality and patient safety, and has received grant funding from the United States Department of Education, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation.