John R Clarke Keynote Address

The Surgical Outcomes Club received a generous contribution to endow the keynote lecture as the “John R. Clarke Keynote Address.” Over the past decade, Dr. Clarke has had a significant impact on the success of the Surgical Outcomes Club. His financial support over the years has allowed us to attract high quality keynote speakers to share their expertise at the Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions. The keynote address remains the highlight of the meeting and a significant component of the continued success of the meeting. This tremendous endowment from Dr. Clarke will ensure the continued success of the keynote address. 

Dr. Clarke is Professor of Surgery, Emeritus, at Drexel University.  Over a 39-year career he was a trauma surgeon, surgical critical care specialist, acute care general surgeon, and director of a level 1 trauma center.  He was also a researcher focused on the effective delivery of surgical care. In 1983, he won the Samuel Gross Prize for surgical research by an American citizen, subsequently published as a monograph: Surgical Judgment Using Decision Sciences.  From 1982 to 1998, as an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked on TraumAID, a federally funded application of decision sciences to the management of trauma resuscitations, resulting in techniques for real-time quality assurance, integration of disparate practice guidelines, and combining anatomical and physiological information with three-dimensional representation using virtual reality.  

He was a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Patient Safety Data Standards that issued the report Patient Safety: Achieving a New Standard for Care, the basis of the national Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, which established Patient Safety Organizations and the Network of Patient Safety Databases. From 2003 to 2014, he was the first Clinical Director of the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, supervising the analysis of approximately 1000 reports of medical errors per day from over 1400 Pennsylvania healthcare facilities.  In 2006, the Authority was awarded the Eisenberg Patient Safety Award by the Joint Commission.  He is now Clinical Director Emeritus. Dr. Clarke has over 150 publications, focusing on the broad topics of surgical decision making and patient safety.

We whole-heartedly thank him for his generous contribution and continued support of the Surgical Outcomes Club!