Well-known patient safety expert Dr. Peter Pronovost has been named director of the new Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins, where researchers aim to discover new ways to cut down on preventable harm.

Pronovost, a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Hopkins, is known widely for developing a checklist to prevent central-line bloodstream infections in ICUs. It’s been adopted in most Maryland hospitals and facilities around the nation and has shown to wipe out the potenetially deadly infections.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that such infections are down 58 percent nationally.

But there are many other kinds of harm, from medication mistakes to misdiagnoses to health disparities. Pronovost will oversee all efforts and will focus on research that will benefit Hopkins and the greater medical community.

"Our team has proved you can take one safety problem and nearly eliminate it by bringing science to the delivery of health care and by using our hospital as a laboratory," said Pronovost in a statement. "Now we want to scale up for all other types of preventable harm using this model of research, practice and evaluation and share that with the world too. We have an amazing team of interdisciplinary researchers and safety leaders to guide the way. I am honored and humbled to be given the opportunity to do just that."

Baltimore Sun file photo of Dr. Pronovost/Kenneth K. Lam