American pediatrician and health-care quality-improvement leader · founding chair of the IHI board of directors
Paul Batalden, MD, is a pediatrician by training who became one of the central figures in American health-care quality improvement: co-founder and founding chair of the board of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and an emeritus professor of pediatrics, community and family medicine, and health policy and clinical practice at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. Earlier he served as assistant surgeon general and director of the Bureau of Community Health Services, and he later founded the U.S. VA National Quality Scholars program and IHI’s Health Professions Educational Collaborative. He was directly influenced by W. Edwards Deming’s thinking about systems and variation — which is exactly why the line he coined is so often handed back to Deming.