Kentucky 45th in the
Nation for Healthcare

Source The Commonwealth Fund

James B. Battles, Ph.D. - Resume

Dr. Battles is a native of Ohio where he did his undergraduate education at Miami University and received his doctorate in medical education from the Ohio State University. In November 2000, Dr. Battles joined the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in Rockville, Maryland as Social Science Analyst for Patient Safety where he is senior content specialist in patient safety for AHRQ’s patient safety initiative. He has led AHRQ’s efforts in advance the use of more proactive risk assessment and moving to risk informed design of patient safety interventions. He also leading AHRQ’s efforts in the assessment of patient safety culture and improving team work in collaboration with the Department of Defense. Dr. Battles is
the AHRQ project officer for the national implementation of a project to eliminate Central Line Associated Infections (CLABSI) in ICUs throughout the United States. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of patient safety having authored numerous articles and book chapters in the past several years. Prior to coming to AHRQ he was Professor of Medical Education at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas where he was co-principal investigator for the Medical Event Reporting System for Transfusion Medicine (MERS-TM) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which has served as a prototype for a national system of reporting near miss events in health care. In addition to his patient safety research, he is an internationally recognized medical educator for his work Problem Based Learning (PBL), the use of Standardized Patients for teaching and evaluation, and the Objective Structured Clinical Evaluation (OSCE) and faculty and curriculum development. Dr. Battles was director and principal investigator for a federally funded (HRSA) fellowship and faculty development program for new primary care faculty in general internal medicine and family medicine. He was also actively involved in other primary care residency and pre-doctoral programs at UT Southwestern. Prior to going to Texas, Dr. Battles served as Director of the Ohio Regional Medical Audiovisual Consortium (ORMAC), an educational cooperative of the seven medical schools in Ohio. Dr. Battles is a retired Captain in the United States Navy specializing in surface warfare, strategic planning and systems design.