Lucian L. Leape, MD

Lucian Leape is an Adjunct Professor of Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard in 1988, he was Professor of Surgery and Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine and Tufts-New England Medical Center.

He has been an outspoken advocate of the nonpunitive systems approach to the prevention of medical errors and has talked and written widely about the need to make patient safety a national priority. His research has focused on measuring errors and adverse events and the identification and correction of underlying systems failures. In addition, he has done extensive research on overuse and underuse of cardiovascular procedures. He has published over 100 papers on quality of care and patient safety.

Dr. Leape was one of the founders of the National Patient Safety Foundation, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Error, and the Harvard Kennedy School Executive Session on Medical Error. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Quality of Care in America Committee, which published “To Err is Human” in 1999 and “Crossing the Quality Chasm” in 2001.

Recent honors include the Distinguished Service Award of the American Pediatric Surgical Association, the Donabedian Award from the American Public Health Association, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator’s Award in Health Policy Research, the duPont Award for Excellence in Children’s Health Care, and honorary fellowship in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. In 2002, Modern Healthcare named him as one of the 100 most powerful people in health care.