New Faculty Spotlight: David M. Liebovitz, MD, FAMIA, FACP

Dr. David Liebovitz has returned to Northwestern as an Associate Vice-Chair in the Department of Medicine. He has also joined the Center for Health Information Partnerships (CHIP) as faculty.

What is your research focus and how did you become interested in the topic?

My research area of interest is in the field of clinical informatics, and specifically, around aspects of patient safety. Topics include clinical decision support, patient engagement, preserving confidentiality, and predictive analytics. I became interested in these topics in part from my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. That is, healthcare encompasses many systems and information sources of growing complexity. As a consequence, the opportunities to improve safety through adoption of engineering principles continue to increase in number and urgency. Simply turning on a new system or feature, even if objectively superior to the old approach in functionality, is unlikely to achieve the expected benefits unless careful attention is paid to each aspect of the design and then to the implementation process. For example, too many clicks in electronic health record (EHR) systems can lead to work arounds, avoiding the intended workflow. Similarly, too many alerts in a system can lead to important alerts being ignored. Additionally, extra clicks and interruptions contribute to physician burnout and stress while not realizing the intended improvements to patient safety. Designing user-centered approaches to optimize clinical guidance, to engage patients, to add systematic redundancy, and to continuously monitor and improve systems offers the prospect of realizing a “learning healthcare system” with improved patient safety.

What is the potential impact of your research?

The potential impact of my research is on each aspect of the Triple Aim framework, which was developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to optimize health system performance: Enhancing patient experience, improving population health, reducing costs, and (now with a “Fourth Aim”) improving the work life of clinicians and staff. That is, my research interests include effective patient engagement through enhanced care experience and education, guidance for appropriate test ordering and patient monitoring, and design of efficient systems with redundancy. All directly contribute to advancing patient safety and to addressing each aspect of the now "Quadruple Aim.”

How can IPHAM researchers contact you to collaborate?

I look forward to collaborating with IPHAM members. My contact information is below.

David M. Liebovitz, MD, FAMIA, FACP
Associate Vice-chair, Department of Medicine
Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine
625 N. Michigan Ave, 15th Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60611
312.503.3738 office
DavidL@northwestern.edu

(published November 25, 2019)