Fellows
2023–2025
Nicole Krenitsky, MD, MBA
Dr. Krenitsky is a Fellow in Patient Safety Research and Clinical Fellow in Maternal-Fetal Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She earned her MD/MBA at Yale Schools of Medicine and Management and went on to complete her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia. Dr. Krenitsky is a current member of the Columbia Housestaff Quality Council and is interested in leveraging informatics and deep learning to improve safety and quality outcomes for obstetric patients.
Chelsey Mitchell, MD
Dr. Mitchell completed medical school at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and her pediatric residency at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital. She is currently in dual roles as a senior pediatric emergency medicine fellow and a patient safety research fellow. Dr. Mitchell completed leadership coursework in Quality Improvement at Cincinnati Children's James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence, focusing on improvement of interpreter services and documentation within the pediatric emergency room at Columbia. She also completed a clinical quality fellowship that focused on creating and leading an enterprise-wide Pediatric Emergency Medicine Sepsis Collaborative with the New York Greater Health Association. Dr. Mitchell's interests are in phenotyping pediatric disease states within the EHR to facilitate real-time data extraction for the purpose of generating high-quality patient research and quality improvement data, with a current focus on pediatric sepsis.
Miriam Callahan, MD
Dr. Callahan is a Fellow in Patient Safety Research and a Resident in General Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She earned her MD at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Callahan is interested in using electronic health record data to improve patient-oriented quality and safety outcomes in critical care and emergency general surgery.
Past PSR Fellows
2021–2023
Benjamin L. Ranard, MD, MSHP
- Deputy Director, Center for Patient Safety Science
- Associate Director, Patient Safety Research Fellowship
- Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Ranard is newly appointed as Deputy Director for the Center for Patient Safety Science and Associate Director for the Patient Safety Research Fellowship. He is also Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine at NYP/CUIMC. Clinically he is a medical intensivist and cares for critically ill patients, including patients in the medical intensive care unit (MICU) at CUIMC. Dr. Ranard received his Doctor of Medicine and Master of Science in Health Policy Research from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and completed his Internal Medicine internship and residency at Duke University Medical Center. He completed his Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine fellowship at Columbia University where he served as Chief Fellow. During his PSR fellowship, Dr. Ranard completed several courses in programming, computer science, and statistics to support his research projects and learn foundational skills in informatics and analytics.
Drawing on his experience as a critical care physician during the pandemic, Dr. Ranard evaluated endotypes, heart rate variability, and mathematical models of COVID-19. His work with mentor Soojin Park, MD, a neuro-intensivist and PI of the Program for Hospital and Intensive Care Informatics (PHICI), used machine learning to identify endotypes of patients with COVID-19. They also found that heart rate variability before death and adrenal size were associated with sudden cardiac death of patients hospitalized with COVID-19, as published in “Heart Rate Variability and Adrenal Size Provide Clues to Sudden Cardiac Death in Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients. Dr. Ranard and Dr. Park collaborated with a multidisciplinary group to publish "Divergent COVID-19 Disease Trajectories Predicted by a DAMP-Centered Immune Network Model" and “Mathematical Model of SARS-CoV-2 Immunity Predicts Paxlovid Rebound”, both of which were selected as top ten submissions for oral presentation at the International Conference on Complex Acute Illness (ICCAI) in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
Dr. Ranard is co-chair of the NYP Sepsis Committee with Dr. Adelman where they are working to improve sepsis care and outcomes at NYP. Recent work includes revising sepsis care pathways and clinical decision support and creation of an automated electronic sepsis dashboard that provides campus- and provider-level process and outcomes metrics for patients with sepsis. Dr. Ranard is also evaluating multiple existing predictive models for sepsis and collaborating with data scientist Carri Chan, PhD, Professor of Decision, Risk, and Operations at Columbia Business School to build a novel predictive model using machine learning. The project was awarded a Columbia Irving Institute Learning Health System–Strategic Priorities Pilot Award in 2022. Under the mentorship of Dr. Adelman, Natalie Yip, MD (Section Chief for Critical Care, Director of Medical Intensive Care and Medical Intensive Care Services), Daniel Brodie, MD (VP and CMO for Critical Care, Johns Hopkins Health System), Shing Lee, PhD (Associate Professor of Biostatics), Min Qian, PhD (Associate Professor of Biostatistics), and Sarah Collins Rossetti, RN, PhD (Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Nursing), Dr. Ranard and team designed a pragmatic, multisite, factorial, randomized controlled trial of electronic sepsis alerts using the systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) criteria screen. The trial will be conducted at 8 acute-care hospitals in the NYC area using a single integrated EHR system to compare 4 SIRS-based sepsis alerting groups. A manuscript describing the trial methods is in process. Dr. Ranard’s proposal for this study led to his recognition as an outstanding early career investigator with Columbia’s inaugural Clinical Trialist Early Career Development Scholars Award.
Research Areas and Interests
Sepsis | EHR optimization | Clinical decision support | Predictive model creation, implementation, and evaluation | Care redesignAwards
Learning Health System Pilot Award (Co-I), Columbia University Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, 2022–2024
Columbia’s Clinical Trialist Scholars Award, 2023
Donald E. Dietz, MD, MS
- Assistant Attending Physician NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
- Assistant Professor of Medicine Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University
Dr. Dietz is a hospitalist at Weill Cornell Medicine and serves as the Weill Cornell Lead for the Center for Patient Safety Science at Columbia University. He graduated from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine in 2014 and completed his internal medicine residency at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center in 2017. He worked as an academic hospitalist for 2 years at UCLA-David Geffen School of Medicine. He then returned to NYP-Columbia for an infectious disease fellowship, which concluded in 2021. He completed a 2-year research fellowship in Patient Safety at Columbia in 2023.
During his PSR fellowship, Dr. Dietz earned his Master’s in Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. To build skills and competencies in analytics and informatics, he completed Columbia’s Foundations for Research Computing Bootcamp, a series on statistical analysis using R, and online training in SQL coding. Dr. Dietz’s research projects focus on developing novel algorithms to develop interventions to promote blood culture stewardship and prevent hospital-associated infections.
Dr. Dietz is also working with other PSR faculty and fellows to conduct an analysis to reduce catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), which are among the most common hospital-associated infections in acute care hospitals. Studies have identified duration of catheterization as a key risk factor for CAUTIs. Dr. Dietz and the PSR team developed a method of accurately measuring indwelling urinary catheter (IUC) dwell time electronically using patient-level EHR data and used that method to examine distribution of IUC dwell time across the multi-campus NYP enterprise. Dr. Dietz is first author of a manuscript in process reporting results, which will be finalized when analysis is completed.
Research Areas and Interests
Hospital medicine | Infectious diseases | Patient safety | Diagnostic stewardship | Hospital-acquired infections
Amanda Esteves, MD, MS
- Department of Pediatrics Columbia University Medical Center
As a pediatric PSR fellow, Dr. Esteves earned a Master’s in Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She graduated from Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in 2017 and completed her pediatric residency at NYP/CUIMC in 2020. Dr. Esteves stayed at Columbia for an additional year as Pediatric Chief Resident. Her research interests include the intersection of patient safety and health equity in the outpatient general pediatric setting with a particular focus on early childhood, community engagement, and education access as a social determinant of health (SDOH).
Dr. Esteves’ primary research project aimed to understand and improve access to Early Intervention (EI) services for children with developmental delays, as many children who qualify fail to receive needed services. To examine baseline referral and acceptance rates, assess referral status and outcomes, and identify risk factors associated with reduced access to services, Dr. Esteves conducted a retrospective chart review and data analysis of children ages 0–3 years seen at four ambulatory care network sites over a 21-month period in 2020–2021 who had a diagnosis eligible for EI. Children with microcephaly and those with cleft lip/palate were significantly less likely to be referred and receive services. In multivariable logistic regression analyses, Dr. Estevez found that housing insecurity, preferred language other than English or Spanish, and follow-up >3 months were significantly associated with decreased receipt of services. Results were presented at the 2022 Pediatric Academic Society Meeting and the 2022 AHRQ NRSA Trainees Research Conference. Based on these results, Dr. Esteves and team created a closed-loop referral system in partnership with three community EI agencies and tracked via NowPow, to provide patients with resources and opportunities for referral to outside agencies. Over 400 patients have been referred since the system was disseminated to four pediatric sites in Fall 2021. Submission of an abstract and manuscript reporting results of this work are in process.
Dr. Esteves is Co-Investigator on a grant awarded through the Columbia University “Addressing Racism Seed Grant Initiative” to create a virtual repository of educational materials related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) that Pediatric Departments can use for training with residents and medical students. She is also recipient of the 2023 Rustin McIntosh Fellowship Award from CUIMC Department of Pediatrics.
Research Areas and Interests
Patient safety | Health equity | Pediatric outpatient care | Early childhood | Community engagementAwards
- Rustin McIntosh Fellowship Award, CUIMC Department of Pediatrics, 2023
- Addressing Racism Seed Grant Initiative (Co-I), Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, Columbia University, 2021
2020–2023
Anne Grauer, MD, MS
- Director of Medication Safety, Center for Patient Safety Science
- Associate Director, Patient Safety Research Fellowship
- Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine, Department of General Medicine
- Associate Director of Quality and Patient Safety, CUIMC Department of Medicine
Dr. Grauer graduated from The Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in 2016. She went on to complete her internship at NYU School of Medicine and residency at New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center in 2020. During her PSR fellowship, Dr. Grauer completed a Master’s in Epidemiology at Mailman School of Public Health and worked with Dr. Siqin Ye and Faculty Mentors Natalie Moise and Ian Kronish to study telehealth effects on chronic disease management, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a retrospective, propensity score matched cohort study of adults with diabetes who had primary care visits in 2020, Dr. Grauer and team found that telemedicine versus in-person visits was associated with significantly reduced odds of risk factor assessment but did not reduce risk factor control. Dr. Grauer is first author of several peer-reviewed publications, including “Association Between Telemedicine Use and Diabetes Risk Factor Assessment and Control in a Primary Care Network” in Journal of Endocrinological Investigation and “Impact of Early Telemedicine Follow-up on 30-day Hospital Readmissions,” in PLoS One.
Pursuing her interest in health IT safety with Dr. Adelman, Dr. Grauer analyzed data from a multicenter study of “indication alerts” integrated into the EHR in two large healthcare systems. Dr Grauer and team also examined national data requested from AHRQ Network of Patient Safety Databases to describe medication order errors by error type, degree of harm, contributing factors, and demographic factors. Both studies, “Indication Alerts to Improve Problem List Documentation” and “Examining Medication Ordering Errors Using AHRQ Network of Patient Safety Databases” were published in JAMIA with Dr. Grauer as first author.
Dr. Grauer also validated a novel automated measure to detect PRN (as needed) errors, a type of frequency error in which a clinician places a medication order standing, cancels the order, then reorders the same medication for the same patient PRN (or vice versa). A manuscript reporting the results of the validation and epidemiology of PRN errors is in process. To assess the generalizability of novel medication error measures developed in Allscripts, Dr. Grauer is leading the validation of these measures in Epic EHR. She will then validate the measures for detecting medication order errors in outpatient settings.
Dr. Grauer is also PI of a study testing a newly developed best practice alert (BPA) in Epic, aimed at decreasing Wrong-Route medication ordering errors. She also obtained private funding for a separate medication safety trial randomizing an indications-based clinical decision support tool aimed at reducing inpatient medication ordering errors.
Research Areas and Interests
Health IT safety | Medication safety | EHR optimization | Clinical decision support tools | Clinical informaticsAwards
The Doctors Company Foundation Award, 2023–2025
2020–2022
Danielle Carter, MD, MS
- Assistant Professor of Medicine Columbia University Medical Center
Dr. Carter is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Medicine. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and completed internal medicine residency at New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center in 2020. During her PSR fellowship, Dr. Carter’s work related to patient safety during the COVID-19 epidemic and prevention of hospital acquired infections. She also obtained a Master’s in Epidemiology from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. She is currently supported by the Empire Clinical Research Investigator Program to continue research related to clinical decision support and health IT safety.
Dr. Carter’s primary research project was a national survey of hospitalists on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the general ward setting. Her team found that from the perspective of hospitalists, system changes intended to accommodate large numbers of critically ill patients with COVID-19 contributed to a more hazardous environment with less efficient care and key themes were identified to describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patient safety. The manuscript “National Survey of Patient Safety in Hospital Medicine during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” has been submitted to Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. In addition, Dr. Carter is co-author of the publication “Critical Care Clinicians’ Experiences of Patient Safety during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in Journal of Patient Safety.
A secondary project involved developing and testing an EHR-embedded Safety Checklist to enable clinicians to address safety metrics that promote adherence to guidelines and best practices in routine patient care. Currently, computerized clinical decision support tools use numerous interruptive EHR alerts, which are disruptive to workflow and often ignored by clinicians. Instead, the Safety Checklist developed by Dr. Carter and a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, quality specialists, and IT analysts is accessible to clinicians to complete at a convenient point in their workflow. They hypothesize the checklist will have higher utilization rates than traditional interruptive alerts and improve clinical care. The evaluation of the Safety Checklist will assess utilization and effects on improving care, including reducing catheter dwell time, increasing deep vein thrombosis prophylaxis, and other process measures.
Research Areas and Interests
Clinical decision support tools | Health IT safety | Patient safety during COVID-19Awards
ECRIP Fellow, 2022–2024
Amanda Rosen, MD, MS
- Weill Cornell Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Fellow, 2022–2025
Dr. Rosen is currently a Pulmonary/Critical Care fellow at NYP-Weill Cornell. She graduated from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in 2017 and completed her internal medicine residency at NYP/CUIMC in 2020. During her PSR fellowship, Dr. Rosen earned a Master’s in Epidemiology from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and led projects related to patient safety during COVID-19 and physician moral injury. She worked with Dr. Jeremy Beitler, a pulmonary intensivist and Director of Clinical Research for the Center for Acute Respiratory Failure at Columbia and collaborators on the multicenter I-SPY COVID-19 trial, a phase 2 platform trial designed to identify single and combination therapeutic agents to improve outcomes in patients with severe COVID-19. Dr. Rosen also collected and analyzed chart review data from the Delta wave (winter 2020–2021) for a COVID-19 class analysis study. Her work contributed to two publications in Nature Medicine and BMJ Open, on which she is a co-author.
Dr. Rosen collaborated with Co-Trainee Dr. Danielle Carter to conduct a national survey of critical care providers to understand the impact of COVID-19 on patient safety. The mixed-methods study revealed hazards that were direct consequences of strain on healthcare providers and systems. Dr. Rosen presented results virtually at the 2021 AHRQ NRSA Trainees Research Conference and is first author of the peer-reviewed publication “Critical Care Clinicians’ Experiences of Patient Safety during the COVID-19 Pandemic” in Journal of Patient Safety, for which she received the Susan P. Baker Award. She is also first author of a commentary on moral injury during the pandemic, published in Journal of General Internal Medicine in collaboration with Dr. Lydia Dugdale, Director of the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.
Research Areas and Interests
Patient safety during COVID-19
Physician moral injuryAwards
Susan P. Baker Award for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention, Mailman School of Public Health, 2022
2019–2021
Pooja K. Reddy, MD, MS
- Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in Surgery, Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition Columbia University Irving Medical Center
- Attending Pediatric Transplant Hepatologist, NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital
Dr. Pooja Reddy is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition at CUIMC and an Attending Pediatric Transplant Hepatologist at NYP Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital. She practices in the Center for Liver Disease and Transplantation. Dr. Reddy earned a BA in Economics from the University of Virginia prior to pursuing her medical education at Emory University School of Medicine and completed her residency in Pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and clinical fellowships in Pediatric Gastroenterology and Advanced Transplant Hepatology at NYP/CUIMC. During this time, she pursued funded formal training in Patient Safety Research and earned a Master’s in Epidemiology from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Dr. Reddy’s clinical practice is focused on the management of pediatric patients with a range of liver diseases including neonatal cholestasis, biliary atresia, rare metabolic diseases, viral hepatitis, liver tumors including hepatoblastoma, and autoimmune liver disease. She completed advanced training in the management of pediatric liver and intestinal failure and is experienced in caring for patients both prior to and after undergoing liver, intestinal and multi-visceral transplants. Dr. Reddy performs several procedures including percutaneous liver biopsy, endoscopy, variceal band-ligation, and colonoscopy. While caring for patients, she aims to educate both her patients and their families as they work together toward shared decision-making and optimal treatment outcomes.
Dr. Reddy’s research interests include patient safety, quality improvement and assurance, and epidemiology and outcomes of pediatric liver diseases and transplant. During her time as a PSR Fellow, she focused on utilizing health information technology to prevent medical errors and improve the quality and efficiency with which patient care is delivered. She continues this work as part of the Empire Clinical Research Investigator Program (ECRIP).
Research Areas and Interests
Pediatric liver diseases and transplant | Health IT safety | Quality improvement | Validation of novel automated measuresAwards
ECRIP Fellow, 2022–2024
Rustin McIntosh Fellowship Award, CUIMC Department of Pediatrics, 2022
SPLIT Trainee Travel Grant Award, Society of Pediatric Liver Transplantation, 2021
2018–2020 Inaugural PSR Fellow
Jerard Z. Kneifati-Hayek, MD, MS
- Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of General Medicine
- Assistant Director of Quality and Patient Safety, Department of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Kneifati-Hayek was the inaugural Patient Safety Research Fellow at CUIMC. He graduated from Weill Cornell Medicine in 2014 and completed residency at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell in 2017. During his PSR fellowship he completed a Master’s in Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and went on to join the faculty at Columbia University Irving Medical Center Department of Medicine, Division of General Medicine as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Kneifati-Hayek now serves as an Assistant Director of Quality and Safety for the Department of Medicine, the faculty advisor for the CUIMC House Staff Quality Council, the co-faculty advisor to the Department of Medicine, Internal Medicine Resident Morbidity and Mortality Conference, and the Co-Chair of the Health Care Quality and Patient Safety Continuing Learning Environment Review at CUIMC/NYP. He is also a member of the CUIMC Internal Review Board and founding Executive Board Member of the Vagelos Physicians & Surgeons Latino Association.
During his time as faculty, Dr. Kneifati-Hayek has received 2 NIH Loan Repayment Awards, is currently an Empire Clinical Research Investigator Program Fellow at NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia, and was 1 of 6 inaugural Clinical Trialist Scholars recognized as an outstanding early career investigator for his project to develop and validate novel automated measures to detect wrong-imaging order errors for use in large-scale intervention trials. Dr. Kneifati-Hayek has multiple first-author publications and is co-author of multiple publications, including one in JAMA Internal Medicine.
