AHRQ Grantee Profile: Gordon D. Schiff, M.D.

Gordon D. Schiff, M.D., AHRQ’s latest grantee profile, explores how AHRQ funding helped shed light on the impact of diagnostic errors.

Earlier in his career at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, Dr. Schiff led an AHRQ-funded investigation that highlighted the magnitude and patterns of diagnostic error, leading to the development of a widely used error classification system. He also led the AHRQ-funded Proactive Reduction of Outpatient Malpractice: Improving Safety, Efficiency, and Satisfaction (PROMISES) project, which revealed that nearly three-fourths of primary care malpractice cases were due to errors of diagnosis. This finding led to recommendations on how to reduce ambulatory safety risk.

Dr. Schiff, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is currently working on an AHRQ-funded project to improve prescribing safety in computerized order entry systems.

Select for Schiff’s profile and profiles of other grantees who have made major advances in health services research.