Senior strives for patient care improvements
Kurt Herzer, a senior public health major and Woodrow Wilson scholar, has a prodigious research résumé that contains co-authored book chapters, awards from international conferences and accolades from physician scientists and clinicians with whom he has worked.
Surprisingly, Herzer's interests were initially in finance, but after attending a Hopkins summer program as a high school student, his interest in medicine quickly began to grow.
Much of his research has centered on improving health care quality and patient safety. His projects have ranged from using simulations to test out new surgery therapies, analyzing records of medical errors and designing models to demonstrate the burden of particular diseases on certain countries.
"What interested me in these kinds of issues is that things are routinely killing patients that need not happen. They're not dying from their diseases: they're dying from things that can be prevented - from infections they shouldn't have gotten, sponges or devices being left inside of them, things that are preventable," he said.
Woodrow Wilson scholars are permitted to pursue multiple research projects throughout the course of their studies. While some students pursue research across several disciplines, Herzer has focused his work on closely-related topics.
In describing his projects, Herzer divided them into "macro" and "micro" levels. Two of his main large-scale projects include his work in the United Kingdom and Geneva.
Herzer cited his "main" Woodrow Wilson project as his work with the National Health Service in the U.K., which has the world's largest medical error reporting system. The system contains some two million reports of medical errors that range from benign to fatal. The database contains a wide variety of errors, including improper medication prescription and mistakes in the operating room.
Unfortunately, the most important aspect of each report, a written account of the error typed by a doctor or nurse, did not have a standardized format. This made it essentially impossible for clinicians to find related cases in the database.
Surprisingly, Herzer's interests were initially in finance, but after attending a Hopkins summer program as a high school student, his interest in medicine quickly began to grow.
Much of his research has centered on improving health care quality and patient safety. His projects have ranged from using simulations to test out new surgery therapies, analyzing records of medical errors and designing models to demonstrate the burden of particular diseases on certain countries.
"What interested me in these kinds of issues is that things are routinely killing patients that need not happen. They're not dying from their diseases: they're dying from things that can be prevented - from infections they shouldn't have gotten, sponges or devices being left inside of them, things that are preventable," he said.
Woodrow Wilson scholars are permitted to pursue multiple research projects throughout the course of their studies. While some students pursue research across several disciplines, Herzer has focused his work on closely-related topics.
In describing his projects, Herzer divided them into "macro" and "micro" levels. Two of his main large-scale projects include his work in the United Kingdom and Geneva.
Herzer cited his "main" Woodrow Wilson project as his work with the National Health Service in the U.K., which has the world's largest medical error reporting system. The system contains some two million reports of medical errors that range from benign to fatal. The database contains a wide variety of errors, including improper medication prescription and mistakes in the operating room.
Unfortunately, the most important aspect of each report, a written account of the error typed by a doctor or nurse, did not have a standardized format. This made it essentially impossible for clinicians to find related cases in the database.
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