Chief Patient Safety & Risk Officer
RLDatix
Timothy McDonald, MD, JD, FCLM is a physician-attorney and former associate-CMO with extensive clinical, academic and leadership experience across the continuum of care. He has assisted over 800 healthcare organizations implement cultures built on safety, transparency and empathy. McDonald received his MD from Indiana University and completed his residencies in pediatrics and anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School-affiliated organizations. Prior to RLDatix, McDonald served as the President, Center for Open and Honest Communication at MedStar Health. Having also obtained his JD at Loyola University Chicago, he continues to drive innovation and excellence at the intersection of medicine and law.
An architect of the CANDOR toolkit, McDonald has focused his career on principled approaches to patient harm and the "normalization of compassionate honesty," with an emphasis on the reporting of patient safety events, the use of human factors-based event analysis and empathic communication following harm. McDonald's advocacy for evidence-based practices, shared learning, improved communication, healthcare equity and empathic approaches has led to tangible advancements. Under his guidance, organizations have seen significant quantitative improvements in their culture of safety scores, a reduction in safety events, improved emotional exhaustion scores and staff retention rates.
McDonald was also recently elected a fellow for the College of Legal Medicine, and his work on the CANDOR toolkit was referenced in the 2023 PCAST Report on patient safety and CMS's Patient Safety Structural Measure.
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Breaking Barriers, Building Trust: The Role of Peer Support in the Patient Safety Movement (87H)
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
3:15pm – 4:15pm CT