We are excited to announce that on July 1, Dr. Samantha Pitts became the Department of Medicine’s inaugural Associate Vice Chair for Ambulatory Quality & Safety.
Dr. Pitts is an assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and core faculty of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. She completed her internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco before earning a Master of Public Health in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley. She then completed fellowship training in both epidemiology through the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and in general internal medicine and comparative effectiveness research at Johns Hopkins. After joining the Department of Medicine faculty as an assistant professor in 2014, she led the implementation of the Comprehensive Unit-Based Safety Program (CUSP) at Green Spring General Internal Medicine. She now serves as co-director of the Armstrong Institute Patient Safety and Quality Leadership Academy, a nine-month program that trains Hopkins faculty and staff to lead patient safety and quality improvement initiatives.
Dr. Pitts’ research focuses on improving population health through the implementation, evaluation and dissemination of evidence-based interventions in ambulatory care, leveraging health information technology and stakeholder engagement to improve systems of health care delivery and health outcomes. She is the director of the new Johns Hopkins Precision Medicine Center of Excellence in Adult Primary Care and serves as an assistant editor of the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.
In her role as Associate Vice Chair for Ambulatory Quality & Safety, Dr. Pitts will oversee the interdisciplinary quality improvement, safety, service and value (QS) activities of Department of Medicine ambulatory practices. Working with the DOM Vice Chair of Quality and Safety (Dr. Steve Berry) and Vice Chair of Ambulatory Operations (Dr. Kim Peairs), she will help to ensure that local ambulatory practice leaders and divisional leaders set and implement annual QS plans that align with Johns Hopkins Health System priorities. She will support divisions by mentoring junior faculty on patient safety and quality improvement, connecting faculty to existing health system resources and advocating for the DOM at the health system level.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Pitts to her new role, and consider sharing your thoughts on ambulatory quality and safety with her. She says, “Let me know your successes and barriers, what is and is not working in ambulatory patient safety and quality improvement within the DOM, how we might improve our processes, and of course, report any safety risks through HERO.”
