Taylor is a Research Assistant working with Dr. Dykes on two fall prevention projects: the Patient Safety Learning Lab (PSLL) study and the STRIDE (Strategies to Reduce Injuries and Develop Confidence in Elders) Study. Her primary focus on the PSLL project is Patient Activation, and how Fall TIPS influences a patient’s knowledge, skill, and confidence in their fall prevention.
In the STRIDE Study, Taylor works as the Site Coordinator for the Partners site. This clinical trial aims to evaluate the effectiveness of using evidence-based strategies to reduce serious fall-related injuries in older adults.
Virginia Ryan, MSN, RN, is a clinical nurse with 33 years’ experience at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital (BWFH) and holds a master’s degree in nursing leadership. As a leader, she actively participates in Shared Governance, Chairs the Nursing Quality Committee, and is passionate about fall prevention. Currently, she is the Fall TIPS Implementation leader at BWFH. With her guidance and enthusiasm about Fall TIPS, there has been a significant decrease in the number of inpatient falls in the first six months of execution. Virginia can be reached at vryan2@bwh.harvard.edu
Megan is a research assistant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School with a passion for patient safety. She has worked on an AHRQ-funded Patient Safety Learning Lab study. Her primary focus is fall prevention and dissemination of the evidence-based Fall TIPS Toolkit, which is shared with outside institutions through continuing education workshops and webinars. Here responsibilities are increasingly focused on spread; she have presented the evidence nationally and shared the toolkit with more than 100 institutions that plan to pilot Fall TIPS.
Srijesa is a Research Assistant working with Dr. Dykes on the Generalizabliity and Spread of an Evidence-Based Fall Prevention Toolkit: Fall TIPS. This is a multisite project in collaboration with New York-Presbyterian and Montefiore Healthcare systems to spread the Fall TIPS program. She has worked on the qualitative aspect of developing the Fall Prevention toolkit, through interviewing patients and staff through the Partners Healthcare system. She has assisted Dr. Dykes with numerous webinars, presentations, and workshops interested in implementing Fall TIPS across the country. She is currently a medical student at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine. Most recently, she worked on qualitative study exploring the facilitators and barriers to Fall TIPS use during the start of Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr. Carroll has maintained programs of research that focuses on fall prevention, improving cardiovascular patient-care outcomes in acute care settings, and translated knowledge into practice by creating environments were nurses can ask questions generated from the bedside and that can be answered in mentored research experiences. Dr. Carroll was a co-investigator on the randomized clinical trial of Fall TIPS. She has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals, 4 book chapters, and has presented her research at a number of regional, national and international research conferences. Dr. Carroll is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, the European Society of Cardiology, and the American Heart Association.
Dr. Bates is an internationally renowned expert in patient safety, using information technology to improve care, quality-of-care, cost-effectiveness, and outcomes assessment in medical practice. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he co-directs the Program in Clinical Effectiveness. He directs the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He served as external program lead for research in the World Health Organization’s Global Alliance for Patient Safety and is the immediate past president of the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua) and the editor of the Journal of Patient Safety. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the American College of Medical Informatics, and was chairman of the Board of the American Medical Informatics Association. He has published over 700 peer-reviewed papers and has an h-index of 115, which ranks him among the 400 most cited biomedical researchers of any type.
Zoe oversees the quantitative data used to analyze the public health impact of integrating the Fall TIPS program into hospitals with diverse patient populations. This includes evaluating the effectiveness of Fall TIPS in reducing inpatient falls and fall related injuries, as well as the costs, benefits, and satisfaction associated with the program. She has experience in healthcare operations, process improvement, and clinical program development/implementation. Her work has focused on quality improvement, the patient experience, and patient safety.
Ann C. Hurley, RN, DNSc, FAAN, FGSA conducts patient safety research as a member of Dr. Patricia Dykes’ teams to “first, ‘do no harm.
Three programs of research characterize Dr. Hurley’s career: diabetes self-care management, caring for persons with advanced dementia, and promoting patient safety. She has led and been a team member of several projects that developed valid and reliable scales needed to answer crucial questions. She has developed two and modified one scale to learn the impact of self-efficacy on self-care management of diabetes. As part of a team led by Dr. Ladislav Volicer to conduct clinical and ethical research to improve the care of persons with advanced dementia, she developed several scales that have been translated into multiple languages, of which 9 in English are reproduced in a 2015 measurement text. Working with Dr. Dykes she has continued the recovery from medical errors work, developed scales to facilitate nursing informatics research, evaluated patient/family and system impacts of bringing health care technology to the bedside of hospitalized patients, and conducted research on falls prevention.
Dr. Dykes’ expertise includes medical informatics, patient safety, and clinical decision support. Dykes and her team developed Fall TIPS, a decision-support and communication intervention for use by the care team, patients and family members to prevent patient falls. Over a six-month randomized-controlled trial, the use of Fall TIPS reduced in-hospital falls by 25%. In addition, she is conducting research on the bedside data needs and preferences of hospitalized patients, and evaluating the use of patient-centered technology for patient engagement in their plan of care and adverse event prevention.
