One of today’s most respected and accomplished patient safety advocates will honor one of the founding fathers of the patient safety movement during the ASA/APSF Ellison C. Pierce, Jr., Patient Safety Memorial Lecture Saturday morning.

Alexander Hannenberg, M.D.

2015 ASA Distinguished Service Award recipient Alexander Hannenberg, M.D., will speak on “Patient Safety Beyond Our Borders: Different But the Same.” Dr. Hannenberg is Associate Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at Newton Wellesley Hospital.

Few others in the field can speak with as much authority on the subjects of global humanitarian outreach, overseas anesthesia education and charitable initiatives that make a demonstrable difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

Dr. Hannenberg is the founding president of the ASA Charitable Foundation. He also is the founding director of Lifebox Foundation U.S., an organization dedicated to supplying pulse oximeters and training to hospitals in developing nations and which has grown into one of the most cost-effective global health interventions in the world.

He has had a long history of service to ASA, notably as president in 2010 and for becoming the first person elected to the position of vice president for professional affairs, which was created in 2004.

He led ASA’s efforts to create performance measures for Medicare’s physician quality program and to establish the Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) and its National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry. He has twice chaired the AMA Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement’s Anesthesiology and Critical Care workgroup.

He currently sits on the board of directors of the AQI and Council on Surgical and Perioperative Safety, and has served on the boards of the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research and the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF). He was appointed to the faculty of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in 2013. In 2014, Dr. Hannenberg joined the faculty of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health care innovation at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham & Women’s Hospital.

APSF President Robert K. Stoelting, M.D., is eager for ANESTHESIOLOGY 2016 attendees to participate in what has become, since its debut in 2012, one of the most important and well-attended sessions at the meeting.

“Dr. Hannenberg and his acclaimed international contributions for advocating worldwide initiatives to enhance anesthesia patient safety make him an outstanding selection to deliver the 2016 ASA/APSF Ellison C. Pierce Patient Safety Memorial Lecture,” said Dr. Stoelting. “His talk will be a fitting tribute to the memory and contributions of APSF’s founding president and past ASA president, Dr. Ellison C. Pierce.”