The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
announced the appointment of two fellows, Dominick L. Frosch, Ph.D., and Dr. Ruth
Shaber, who will join its new national Patient Care Program. The program focuses
on meaningfully engaging patients and their families in their own healthcare
and developing a systems approach that reconfigures inter-professional teams,
processes and technology to encourage and support patient and family engagement.
Frosch and Shaber will bring specific expertise in these areas to the Moore
Foundation team.
Frosch is a behavioral scientist experienced with engaging
patients in their healthcare, in both primary-care and specialty-care settings.
His work focuses on implementing patient decision support interventions–tools
used to encourage shared decision making– and draws on qualitative methods to
identify factors associated with successful implementation and explore patient
perspectives. Patient and family engagement is central to the Foundation’s
focus on eliminating preventable harm and improving the quality, safety and
affordability of healthcare.
Shaber most recently served as medical director of the
Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute, where she focused on ways to
create reliable, quality performance in clinical settings. Shaber has specific
expertise in cardiovascular disease prevention, behavioral health, maternity
and cancer care. In addition to patient and family engagement, improving the
healthcare system and its reliable performance, is key to the Moore
Foundation’s Patient Care program.
Their
expertise, along with current team members at the foundation, will support the
program’s start, which is initially focusing on eliminating all preventable
harms to adult patients in acute-care settings. Each year tens of thousands of
preventable deaths occur in U.S. hospitals, and millions of dollars are spent
on complications and patient readmissions that could be averted. Additionally,
fewer than half of all patients report feeling part of and respected by the
healthcare system that serves them. The foundation believes that patients’
loss of dignity and respect is also a significant, preventable harm and has
expanded its definition of “harm” to reflect its emphasis on ensuring dignity
and respect for patients and families.
“It’s
ambitious for us to seek elimination of preventable harm, but we must strive
for no less,” Dr. George Bo-Linn, chief program officer for the Patient Care
Program, said. “Drs. Shaber and Frosch are leaders in their respective fields.
Their experience and expertise will help us achieve that goal. I’m thrilled to
have them as colleagues at the Moore Foundation.”
If the program develops as anticipated,
the Moore Foundation expects to allocate a half billion dollars over ten years
towards that goal. The Patient Care Program includes and builds on the
achievements of the foundation’s Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative, which is
significantly improving adult patient care in northern Californian hospitals,
and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at the University of California,
Davis, which is transforming healthcare through nursing education, research and
leadership.
About the Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000,
seeks to advance environmental conservation, patient care and scientific
research. For more information please visit www.moore.org.