Circulation 118,032 • Volume 30, No. 2 • October 2015   Issue PDF

APSF/AQI Patient Safety Career Development and Research Award: Announcing the 2015 Recipient

Joseph A. Hyder, MD, PhD

The APSF and the Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) have joined together to co-sponsor an APSF/AQI Patient Safety Career Development and Research Award. Both organizations are dedicated to improving patient safety and the delivery of anesthesia care. Specifically, their respective bylaws and mission statements include

  • AQI: “will promote patient health and safety through the fostering of advances in quality of care measurement and improvements in the delivery of anesthesia medical care.”
  • APSF: “to improve continually the safety of patients during anesthesia care by encouraging and conducting safety research and education…”

A joint committee of the 2 organizations is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2015-2016 award is Joseph A. Hyder, MD, PhD. Dr. Hyder is an assistant professor in the Mayo Clinic Department of Anesthesiology in Rochester, MN. Dr. Hyder obtained his MD and PhD (epidemiology) degrees from the University of California, San Diego. After an internship in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, he undertook his anesthesiology residency training at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. He subsequently was a fellow in Critical Care Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a Research Scholar in Residence at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital’s Center for Surgery & Public Health. In that latter role, he worked extensively with the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program’s (NSQIP) database.

Dr. Hyder’s research agenda addresses definitions of surgical quality as they are used for local quality improvement and national benchmarking. His work in quality measurement includes assessing adequacy of surgical risk adjustment, evaluating complication cascades to measure quality, and investigating perioperative strategies to improve surgical outcomes. Dr. Hyder will work with the AQI and National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR) to extend the possibilities of real-world performance measurement, aiming for performance measures that have good face value, are practical for local quality improvement, and can drive value and safety nationally.

One unique feature of the award is that Dr. Hyder will participate in meetings of the APSF Executive Committee and the AQI Board of Directors. His participation will expose him to the breadth of issues that the 2 organizations address. Dr. Hyder will be asked to consider potential collaborative initiatives that the APSF and AQI might pursue together to improve patient safety and improved anesthesia delivery models.

Both organizations extend congratulations to Dr. Hyder for being the inaugural recipient of this award.