Rollin J. "Terry" Fairbanks, MD, MS

Rollin J. “Terry” Fairbanks, MD, MS, is senior vice president and chief quality & safety officer at MedStar Health, a 10-hospital system in the Washington DC and Baltimore MD region, professor of emergency medicine at Georgetown University, and executive director of the MedStar Institute for Quality & Safety.

Known as a human factors safety science expert, Dr. Fairbanks founded MedStar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in 2010, the largest embedded healthcare human factors center in the US. He has consulted with the US, Australian, UK, and Spanish governments and numerous healthcare systems around the US to develop healthcare human factors safety programs, and has authored more than 200 publications and edited a book on human factors engineering applications to healthcare safety. In 2013, Dr. Fairbanks served as chair of the U.S. National Academies workshop on Resilience Engineering in Healthcare, has spoken at resilience engineering meetings in Belgium, Denmark, Australia, and the US, and has mentored graduate students in the application of resilience engineering in healthcare.

A focus of his work has been on improving response to events in healthcare, as co-author of AHRQ’s CANDOR event review process, and a member of the committee that developed the IHI/NPSF RCA-squared approach.

Dr. Fairbanks was recently named as a Fellow in the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, has been listed twice in Becker’s Hospital Review “Top 50 Experts Leading the Field of Patient Safety,” the 2021 Robert L. Wears Patient Safety Leadership Award, and the 2021 Medical Society of the District of Columbia’s John Benjamin Nichols Award for outstanding contributions toward improving the health of the community. Dr. Fairbanks practices emergency medicine at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center.