
Terry Fairbanks, MD, MS
VP and Chief Quality & Safety Officer- MedStar Health
Rollin J. “Terry” Fairbanks, MD, MS, is vice president and chief quality & safety officer at MedStar Health, a 10-hospital system in the Washington DC and Baltimore MD region, and professor of emergency medicine at Georgetown University. Dr. Fairbanks practices emergency medicine at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Known nationally as a human factors safety expert, Dr. Fairbanks founded MedStar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in 2010, the largest embedded healthcare human factors center in the US. He has consulted with the US, Australian, UK, and Spanish governments and numerous healthcare systems around the US to develop healthcare human factors safety programs, and has authored more than 200 publications and edited a book on human factors engineering applications to healthcare safety. Dr. Fairbanks has been listed in Becker’s Hospital Review “Top 50 Experts Leading the Field of Patient Safety,” the 2021 Robert L. Wears Patient Safety Leadership Award, and the 2021 Medical Society of the District of Columbia’s John Benjamin Nichols Award for outstanding contributions toward improving.