Dr. Ken Sands DMS '87: A 'Quality' Career in Health Care

Dr. Ken Sands, DMS '87

Dr. Ken Sands, DMS '87, is a nationally- recognized expert in health care quality improvement whose work is helping to transform medicine at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and beyond.

As Vice President of Health Care Quality at BIDMC, Dr. Sands oversees patient safety, environmental safety, risk management, professional staff affairs, and performance measurement and improvement throughout the Medical Center. In addition, Dr. Sands remains clinically active as an internist and infectious disease specialist, and teaches a quality improvement elective for residents. The elective, created about six years ago by Dr. Sands and his colleagues at BIDMC, combines instruction with hands-on projects, with the goal of giving residents a detailed understanding of quality improvement processes and allowing them to play an active role in improving the hospital's systems.

A 'Quality' Career

While Dr. Sands maintains that quality improvement was not what he envisioned himself doing when he left Dartmouth, he does recall an early introduction to the topic, courtesy of Dr. David Nierenberg. "I remember David Nierenberg emphasizing the importance of evaluating one's own practice," he says. "The message was, we need to have responsibility not only for having scientific knowledge, but also for applying that knowledge in a way that meets the best interests of the patient."

It wasn't until he began his postgraduate studies at BIDMC that Dr. Sands' interest in health care quality improvement was sparked. "I became interested in infection control and epidemiology as part of my infectious disease training, and infection control led me to continuous quality improvement and hospital operations," Dr. Sands explains.

In 1993, Dr. Sands earned his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. He served as a staff physician and the director of infection control at BIDMC until 1999, when he was offered the position as vice president of health care quality.

While Dr. Sands finds tremendous satisfaction in all aspects of his career, he takes particular pride in the great strides care providers, including residents, at BIDMC have taken in making performance measurement and quality improvement part of their core activities. "We've gotten to a place where physicians and nurses are aware of the need to be constantly evaluating their own practice and thinking of ways to improve and use the tools of quality improvement to do so. It's the best opportunity to improve the care of our patients and our health care system overall," Dr. Sands observes.

An Evening of Transforming Medicine

Despite the demands of his many roles at BIDMC, Dr. Sands still finds time to support his alma mater in a variety of meaningful ways. In addition to giving to the Fund for Dartmouth Medical School, he is also a member of the DMS Alumni Council, a post he assumed in 2003. Most recently, Dr. Sands hosted the first of the Transforming Medicine Education series, which was held on April 4, 2006 in Boston.

The Transforming Medicine Education series, explains Dr. Sands, "is a terrific opportunity to hear about some of the innovation taking place at Dartmouth, and to learn more about the Transforming Medicine Campaign."

Guests included DMS alumni, as well as alumni from Dartmouth College, Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS), and the Tuck School of Business. Members of DMS's philanthropic community were also in attendance. "It brought together a really diverse group of people committed to Dartmouth," says Dr. Sands, noting that the graduation years of the attendees spanned more than fifty years. "It was great to be able to talk with people who are nearby geographically, but who are in diverse practice environments and with very different concerns and views than someone like me who's in a large academic medical center."

The evening's keynote speaker was Gerald O'Connor, Sc.D., Ph.D., director of graduate educational programs at the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences and professor of Medicine and of Community and Family Medicine at DMS. In his address, "Taking the Measure of Health Care," O'Connor explored the ways data can be used to transform medicine and improve the quality of health care.

It was a discussion that Dr. Sands found "incredibly relevant" to his work at BIDMC. He notes, "We were treated to an intriguing and innovative view of some of the key issues facing medicine today and, how DMS is directly taking them on through creative analyses and actions."

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