Andreas Schnitzbauer, MD | Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership
Recently Andreas Schnitzbauer, MD, the Professor of Surgery, Deputy Director and Senior Attending, Frankfurt University Hospital and a graduate of the 2019 Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership program answered some questions about his experience in the program.
Why did you enroll in the Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership?
After 15 years in surgery, I really wanted to evolve to another level of understanding. We are an institution that is very dedicated to quality and patient safety. I wanted to dig deeper into this topic and get a profound understanding of how improvement is generated.
What was the most important aspect of the course for you?
The most important aspects were the generation of a unique network from the program. The quality of my colleagues from all fields of health care and its associated professions, the faculty that we met and our team assignments—we were honored as the best team of the year—really made for a rich discussion and exchange of ideas.
What is your professional background?
I am the deputy director of abdominal, visceral and transplant surgery at the University Hospital Frankfurt, Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
I am deeply involved in a state program of creating a safety and quality program run by our Safety, Risk and Quality Management Department, and we established technical solutions for patient safety in our EHR—structured risk assessment and automated scoring, automated complication assessment and scoring from routine data.
What impact has the course had on you professionally?
I developed my negotiation skills significantly. I was able to write and pitch a business case for a project together with one of my thesis students in Frankfurt and a colleague from my Harvard course. Currently, we are collecting money for the project from business angles, the industry and international/national funding bodies of research. As for now, I only can tell you that we are developing a medicinal product class II to support patient safety before major surgeries.
Have you authored, published or completed any implementation related to Safety, Quality, Informatics or Leadership?
We are currently performing a prospective double-blinded trial in the ER that investigates an app-based diagnostic tool as decision support in abdominal pain. The protocol paper was submitted. Furthermore, I was deeply involved in several projects on patient-blood management since 2015, which also generated several publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Any other details or experiences you had with the program you would like to share?
It is the best thing you can do in your professional life. And this program brings all fields and areas of medicine together on a completely new level of understanding.
Learn more about the Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership program.