Dr. Shojania received his medical degree from the University of Manitoba (1994), undertook an internship at the University of British Columbia, and completed his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard University in Boston (1995-98), where he also began his training in clinical research in quality improvement. After a fellowship in outcomes research at the University of California San Francisco, Dr. Shojania stayed on faculty there for 4 years before returning to Canada-first to the University of Ottawa and, more recently, the University Toronto, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement.

Dr. Shojania’s research focuses on identifying evidence-based patient safety interventions and effective strategies for translating evidence into practice. In 2001, while at the University of California, Dr. Shojania led a team from 10 academic institutions across the US to produce Making Healthcare Safer, a comprehensive evidence report for the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality synthesizing the evidence supporting over 75 practices aimed at improving patient safety. Highlights of the report appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and over 140,000 copies of the full report have been obtained since its release. His work has appeared in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine. He has twice delivered invited presentations on patient safety and quality improvement to the US Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Shojania has also led a number of educational initiatives in patient safety, including a series of 13 case-based articles in Annals of Internal Medicine, and two publicly available websites produced for the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which receive approximately 100,000 visits each month. A book on patient safety for a general audience co-authored with Dr. Robert Wachter has sold over 50,000 copies since its publication in 2004. For this and other work, Dr. Shojania shared with Dr. Wachter one of the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety Awards (2004) from the US Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the National Quality Forum for work in patient safety that has had an impact at a national level.

Competing Interests

Have you in the past five years accepted the following from an organisation that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of papers in the BMJ?

Reimbursement for attending a symposium?
No

A fee for speaking?
I receive occasional honouraria for invited lectures at conferences on patient safety and quality improvement. For continuing medical education conferences at which I have presented and received honouraria, the topics of my presentations have either been patient safety and quality improvement or general topics in evidence-based medicine and literature searching, not the management of specific clinical conditions or use of any particular drugs/devices/products. I do not receive any honouraria or support of any kind from industry sponsors.

A fee for organising education?
The University of Toronto Centre for Patient Safety, which I direct, has recently received funding from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care to organize several educational conferences for physicians in Ontario as part of a quality improvement initiative. The participants receive financial support from the Ministry of Health for carrying out quality improvement projects in their practice settings. The education conferences and ongoing “coaching” we provide at the University of Toronto Centre for Patient Safety supports the efforts of these physicians in designing and carrying out their specific quality improvement initiatives.

Funds for research?
My funding comes solely from peer review federal sources in Canada (e.g., the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the Government of Canada Research Chairs Program) and my academic medical centre (the University of Toronto and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre) . I receive some salary support as part of a subcontract with the University of California San Francisco for work commissioned by the US federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality. I do not receive any industry funding.

Funds for a member of staff?
Staff funding comes solely from federal grant sources and the academic medical centre where I work.

Fees for consulting?
I have occasionally received consulting fees from hospitals interested in addressing internal patient safety or quality improvement problems. I have deposited these fees in the operating accounts of the University of Toronto Centre for Patient Safety.

Have you in the past five years been employed by any organisation that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of papers in the BMJ?
No

Do you hold any stocks or shares in an organisation?
No

Do you have any other competing financial interests?
No

I have no competing interests/I have the following competing interests.
None