Dr. Abraham Jacob, MD, MHA is the Chief Quality Officer for M Health Fairview, where he leads quality, safety, and improvement efforts across a multi-hospital system. He is also an Associate Professor in Pediatrics and Internal Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Jacob began his career as a combined internal medicine and pediatrics clinician and helped start the first Med-Peds primary care practice in the Twin Cities. He later built the Pediatric Hospital Medicine Division and served as Chief Medical Officer at M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital, focusing on patient safety, quality, and experience. He holds an MD from the University of Toledo and an MHA from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and his work emphasizes building reliable systems, reducing harm, and developing improvement capability in healthcare.

Allison (“Allie”) Muniak is the Executive Director of Health System Improvement at Health Quality BC, where she leads provincial efforts to advance quality, safety, and patient-centred care. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Calgary and a Master of Applied Science in Human Factors Engineering from the University of Toronto. Prior to joining HQBC, Allie served as Executive Director of Quality & Patient Safety and Infection Prevention & Control at Vancouver Coastal Health. Throughout her career, she has brought human factors thinking directly to the frontlines—observing hundreds of surgical cases to understand how teams truly use safety checklists, and listening to frontline nurses whose insights ultimately contributed to a global infusion tubing recall. Allie is passionate about building cultures where people feel safe to speak up and helping healthcare systems move from policies to meaningful, sustained improvement.

Amy Billett, MD is a retired pediatric hematologist-oncologist and nationally recognized leader in healthcare quality and safety. She is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and has held senior quality leadership roles at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s and Nemours Children’s Health. Dr. Billett is known for pioneering work that dramatically reduced ambulatory central-line infections through family-centered design and systems-based improvements. She has also led major EHR initiatives and mentored more than 100 trainees, shaping the next generation of quality-focused clinicians.

Brian Wong, MD, is a general internist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Director of the Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (CQIPS) at the University of Toronto. He has spent his career working at the intersection of frontline care, education, research, and health system improvement. Brian has trained hundreds of clinicians in quality improvement, led system partnerships focused on equity and operational integration, and contributed to advancing improvement science internationally. He is also the current steward of the SQUIRE Guidelines, helping shape how quality improvement work is designed, evaluated, and shared across healthcare systems.

Dr. Chris Dale is a pulmonary and critical care physician based in the Seattle area with Providence. He previously served as Chief Quality Officer and Chief Medical Officer at Swedish Health Services and has held CMO roles in health data startups. His work focuses on using data, AI, and clinical decision support to improve care delivery and system performance. He is also co-founder of Arborgenie, an AI company supporting small medical practices.

Chris I. Wong, MD, MPH is a pediatric and young-adult oncologist and a leading quality-and-safety physician at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center and UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital. She serves as Medical Director of Quality Improvement & Patient Safety, focusing on reducing preventable harm in pediatric and adult oncology. Dr. Wong trained at Boston Children’s/Dana-Farber and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and is known for her work improving ambulatory central-line safety through deep partnership with patients and families.

 Dr. Curtis “Curt” Smecher is a specialist anesthesiologist and seasoned physician leader in British Columbia.  Over the past decade he has led the province-wide Physician Quality Improvement (PQI) initiative under Doctors of BC, and was the first to implement it in Fraser Health in 2014. He is known for emphasizing collaboration, rigor in problem-solving, and integrating physicians, patients and administrators in health-system change. His rural and suburban clinical experience gives him deep insight into the challenges of delivering care across varied communities. In 2019, he won the Fraser Health “Health Care Hero” award for his leadership in advancing physician-driven quality improvement. 

An internationally respected scholar-practitioner of the Science of Improvement. With twenty-five plus years of experience in improvement, I work with leaders and teams worldwide to develop people’s abilities to make rigorous, results-driven improvements and adopt quality as an organizational strategy. 

I am a co-author, with Lloyd Provost and Cliff Norman, of the books Quality as an Organizational Strategy and The QOS Field Guide.

I am a former quality executive, board member, and senior leader at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. I am a lead faculty of the IHI Improvement Advisor Professional Development program and developed IHI's Chief Quality Officer program. 

I created the Mr. Potato Head and Coin Spin PDSA exercises, used worldwide to teach PDSA testing and measurement for improvement. 

I'm a former city paramedic and a subject matter expert on ambulance service system design.

Deborah Unger, MD, FAAHPM is a board-certified palliative care physician and Director of Medical Informatics with Institute for Human Caring at Providence.She completed her medical degree at Texas A&M College of Medicine,followed by internal medicine residency with the University of Miami in West Palm Beach,then both research and clinical palliative care fellowships at Stanford University before taking a position as an attending physician at the Nashville VA Medical Center, as well as serving as faculty with Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Hospice and Palliative Care fellowship. In early 2022, she transitioned to her current role as the health system’s Palliative Care Specialty Provider Informaticist, chairs the Palliative Care Clinical Decision Team, and is an active physician builder-analyst. She is also a chair emeritus for Epic’s Palliative Care Specialty Steering Board. She enjoys finding new escape rooms, building Lego, and underwater photography.

Gayle Grout is Executive Director of the Health Data Coalition of British Columbia, a physician-led not-for-profit organization supporting primary care clinicians with aggregate electronic medical record data and insights to improve practice and patient outcomes. She is a seasoned leader in information management, with experience in IT strategy, software implementation, business development, and systems design that enhance clinician workflows and measurement capacity. Under her leadership, HDC advances trusted data solutions that help clinicians understand population health trends, engage in meaningful improvement work, and advocate for better services in their communities. Gayle’s work bridges the technical, cultural, and human elements of data-informed care in primary care settings across British Columbia.

Dr. Hilary Babcock is the Vice President and Chief Quality Officer at BJC HealthCare, an academic–community health system spanning more than a dozen hospitals and 33,000 employees. A physician trained in infectious diseases and hospital epidemiology, she spent 16 years leading infection prevention and occupational health before transitioning into her system-wide CQO role in 2021. During COVID-19, she served in incident command, helping translate rapidly evolving science into clear, actionable guidance for clinicians and staff. Today she oversees quality, patient safety, infection prevention, regulatory readiness, patient experience, and clinical analytics, with a focus on making complex systems simple, actionable, and aligned with BJC’s values of kindness, respect, excellence, safety, and teamwork.

Dr. Sivjee attained an undergraduate degree in Health Care Organization and Policy from Brown University and went to The University of Connecticut for medical school.  He completed his Internal Medicine residency and was Chief Resident at Yale University and a then completed a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.  After working for Kaiser Permanente in California, he and his family moved to Toronto in 2005 when he became The Division Head of Respirology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

Dr. Khalil Sivjee now serves as Medical Director of Cleveland Clinic Canada.  He is also the Chief Medical Director of Royal Bank of Canada.  He holds an active teaching appointment as Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto Temerty Faculty of Medicine.  

 Kimiyoshi Kobayashi, MD, MBA is Chief Medical Officer at UMass Memorial Medical Center (850-bed academic center, Central MA). He leads quality, safety, and capacity and oversees Hospital Medicine, eICU, Employee Health, and Palliative Care, and mentors physician leaders. He joined UMass in 2019 as Chief Quality Officer, founded the Center for Quality & Safety, and helped lift CMS from 1 to 4 stars in four years. His research covers handoff safety, patient transfers, and how capacity affects outcomes. National service includes the Vizient AMC CQO Network Steering Committee and SHM’s Quality & Patient Safety Committee. Previously, he held leadership roles in informatics, clinical operations, and capacity at Mass General and Johns Hopkins. MD Johns Hopkins; MBA Harvard Business School; Internal Medicine residency, Mass General. 

Dr. Desveaux is a scientist and Director of the Learning Health System Leadership Center at the Institute for Better Health at Trillium Health Partners. She is a Senior Fellow with AMS Healthcare, an Assistant Professor with IHPME at the University of Toronto, and a 2023-24 Leadership Fellow with the International Women's Forum. Dr. Desveaux’s program of work focuses on learning health systems, the future of leadership, and high performing organizations and teams in healthcare. Her expertise in behavioral science tackles healthcare’s most persistent problems by examining what drives behaviors, how and why things work, and identifying how context influences success (and failure). Her core This approach provides insights into how to effect change at both individual and system levels. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Women Who Lead, a not-for-profit dedicated to supporting the career advancement and leadership development of women in the health sector. 

Dr. Lawrence Yang is a Surrey, BC family physician in practice since 2008.  He has served as Head of Family Medicine at Surrey Memorial Hospital and sits on the boards of the Health Data Coalition and the Surrey–North Delta Division of Family Practice. He earned his MD at Ross University School of Medicine (2005) and completed a Family Medicine residency at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY (2005–2008).  He has pursued leadership development through SFU Beedie, UBC Sauder, and Fraser Health’s Physician Quality Improvement program. Yang has also spoken publicly about his own experience with burnout and now leads physician-wellness and Joy in Work workshops across Canada as well as at the 2024 Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Annual Forum. 

Dr. Lee Erickson is a physician executive and nationally respected leader in healthcare quality, safety, and systems improvement. Trained as a primary care physician, she has held senior leadership roles across major academic and community health systems, including leading large-scale system change initiatives within the Allegheny Health System in Pennsylvania, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and Tufts Medicine in Boston. At MSKCC, she served as Deputy Physician-in-Chief for Operations, where she helped redesign inpatient flow and discharge processes at scale, producing durable improvements in capacity, patient experience, and staff workflow. Dr. Erickson is known for integrating Lean thinking, scientific problem-solving, and coaching-based leadership into healthcare management. She is currently the CEO and co-founder of Adaptient, where she works with health systems to build leadership capability, learning systems, and sustainable improvement cultures.

Lisa Harton, DNP, MBA/MPH, RN, CIC, is Chief Quality Officer at Amplify Health, where she leads enterprise efforts in quality, safety, and performance improvement across a multi-state health system. With nearly 30 years in healthcare, she began her career in neonatal intensive care before moving into infection prevention, operational leadership, and executive quality roles. Harton is known for advancing systemwide improvement through appreciative inquiry, governance alignment, and high-reliability principles. She is an active member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Chief Quality Officer Network and focuses on building cultures where teams can learn, collaborate, and deliver safer care.

Matthew Gonzales, MD, FAAHPM is a fellowship-trained, 
board-certified palliative medicine physician and serves as 
Associate Vice President and Chief Medical and Operations Officer 
for the Institute for Human Caring at Providence. A graduate of 
Stanford University, he began his career as a software engineer 
developing tools to support HIV care before attending the Keck 
School of Medicine. He completed his internal medicine residency 
and palliative medicine fellowship at UCSF and later held faculty 
roles at both UCSF and City of Hope.

In 2017 he was named a Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar, recognizing his leadership in advancing palliative care. He is also a frequent national speaker on palliative care innovation, clinical transformation, and the evolving role of AI in healthcare and contributes his expertise on several national advisory boards dedicated to improving serious illness care

Paul M. Lambrecht, FACHE, is Vice President of Quality and Patient Safety at Cooper University Health Care and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University. With over 30 years of leadership experience, he leads Cooper’s efforts in quality, safety, and high reliability.

Previously, Paul was System Vice President of Quality and Patient Safety at Inspira Health, where he led initiatives earning consecutive Leapfrog “A” Safety Grades and Top Hospital Awards, and oversaw Inspira’s high-reliability journey, EMR transition, and COVID-19 response.

He holds degrees in Biology, Health Administration, and Health Law, and is a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives, Certified in Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety, and a graduate of the IHI Chief Quality Officer program.

Rollin J. “Terry” Fairbanks, MD, MS, is Senior Vice President and Chief Quality & Safety Officer at MedStar Health and Professor of Emergency Medicine at Georgetown University. He leads clinical quality, patient safety, infection prevention, and health equity across a 10-hospital academic system in the Baltimore/Washington region. An emergency physician, human factors engineer, safety scientist, and former paramedic and pilot, he founded the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in 2010, now the largest embedded center of its kind in the U.S. He has authored 200+ publications and a book on healthcare safety, and advised organizations in the US, UK, and Australia. Dr. Fairbanks serves on the National Academies Board on Human-Systems Integration and chairs the IHI Certified Professional in Patient Safety (CPPS) Board. He holds degrees from Potsdam College, Virginia Tech, VCU, and trained in emergency medicine at the University of Rochester.

Dr. Ryan Dix is a licensed psychologist who serves as the Clinical Director for the No One Cares Alone umbrella of programs serving Providence caregivers. Since 2013, Dr. Dix has served in several roles at Providence, including Clinic Manager for Providence Medical Group’s Oregon Adult and Senior Psychiatry clinics, and Behavioral Health Manager of Primary Care/Medical Specialties for Providence Medical Group in Oregon and Southwest Washington.

Prior to that, he spent five years as a Behavioral Health Provider with Providence where he also worked as a behavioral medicine faculty member for the internal medicine residency program. Dr. Dix  served as the legislative committee chair for the Oregon Psychological Association (OPA) and has served in several roles on that board as well as the liaison from OPA for the Oregon Board of Psychology.

Dr. Todd Allen, MD, MPH is a senior physician executive and nationally recognized leader in healthcare quality, safety, and physician leadership development. He has served in multiple executive roles, including at Intermountain Health and more recently as Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer at The Queens Health Systems in Honolulu, where he led enterprise-wide strategies to improve clinical outcomes, patient safety, and organizational performance. Dr. Allen is board-certified in emergency medicine and brings a rigorous systems lens to improvement work. He is widely respected for advancing physician leadership capability, fostering cultures of psychological safety and learning, and aligning quality improvement with front-line clinical practice and executive priorities.