Director, John Hopkins Center of Health Services and Outcomes Research
Albert Wu is a trained physician who has devoted his career to improving the quality, patient safety, and outcomes of patients.
Wu has studied the handling of medical errors since 1988, and has published influential papers including “Do house officers learn from their mistakes” (JAMA 1991). He coined the term “second victim” for health workers traumatized by patient adverse events. He is co-founder and co-director of the RISE (Resilience in Stressful Events) peer-support program for health workers. He was the first to measure quality of life outcomes in HIV clinical trials and developed the MOS-HIV Health Survey, a leading patient-reported outcome measure for people with HIV.
He was a member of the Institute of Medicine committee on Preventing Medication Errors, and senior adviser to the World Health Organization Patient Safety program in Geneva from 2007 to 2009.