Physician Wellbeing Leader of the Year:
Personal leadership, policy change, and creating healthy workplaces take strong leadership and physicians who speak up as well as step up. Past winners include Rasu Shrestha, MD MBA and Bridgette Duffy, MD.
Dr. Megan Ranney, MD MPH is the Sharp Index Physician Leader of the year. A practicing emergency physician and researcher, Dr. Megan Ranney's focus is on the intersection between digital health, violence prevention, and public health. Dr. Ranney is the recently named dean of Yale School of Public Health. She was the Deputy Dean for the School of Public Health, as well as founding Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health. She is also co-founder and Senior Strategic Advisor for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, the country's only non-profit committed to reducing firearm injury through the public health approach, and a founding partner of GetUsPPE.org, dedicated to matching donors to health systems in need of protective equipment. She is a Fellow of the fifth class of the Aspen Health Innovators Fellowship Program and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
Dr. Fisher has helped more than 5,000 leaders, team members, and employees live and work. His programs help “train the mind and heal the heart.” Why? Having recovered from a painful decade-long journey through anxiety, depression, and burnout as a cardiologist working on the front lines of life and death, his life purpose is to help others care for their hearts — both physical and emotional. Harvard-trained physician and practicing cardiologist with 20 years of clinical experience who has helped thousands of individuals live longer and better lives. UK-trained certified mindfulness and meditation practitioner and experienced facilitator. Dr. Fisher is known as “the mindful heart doctor” and is the co-founder of ending clinician burnout.
Pooja Lakshmin, MD is a psychiatrist working at the intersection of mental health and gender. "I help women heal from the tyranny of faux self-care, while exposing the systems that have gotten us here. In 2020, frustrated by the systemic forces that thwart women as well as the gaps in the mental health system, I founded Gemma, a physician-guided women’s mental health community, centering impact and equity. In 2022, my colleagues Dr. Kali Cyrus MD MPH and Dr. Lucy Hutner MD joined the leadership team of Gemma. I am a leading voice at the intersection of mental health and gender, focused on helping women and other marginalized communities escape the tyranny of self-care." Lakshmin has founded Gemma. Gemma is creating a community of folks who are questioning the status quo and changing the way we think about women’s mental health.
Tina Shah MD, MPH, is a physician-scientist focused on redesigning healthcare so that clinicians can work at the top of their game. She is Principal of TNT Health Enterprises LLC and a Senior Advisor to the US Surgeon General, advising on clinician wellbeing, digital transformation, and health policy. Tina is a founding member of the National Academy of Medicine Clinician Well-being Action Collaborative and a national speaker on clinician well-being. During the pandemic, she oversaw virtual care and COVID-19 response at Wellstar Health System. She continues to actively practice on the frontlines in the ICU.
He was the former CMO at a Merck subsidiary focused on commercializing digital solutions. Prior to Merck, Tom was part of the team that developed the Affordable Care Act on the House Committee on Ways and Means and worked on the development of a national framework for the use of electronic health records as Medical Director at the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT, HHS. He started his career as Chief Medical Officer working at Charles B. Wang, a Federally Qualified Health Center serving the immigrant Asian population in NYC and served on the Board of Health for NYC. He currently serves on several boards including BCBS Kansas City.
Howard Luks is a highly respected Orthopedic surgeon, runner, cyclist, and sports medicine physician. In addition to being an expert in shoulder, knee, and other sports injuries, he's an avid "food is medicine" practitioner, and in 2022 published his latest book, "Longevity Simplified." In his words, healthcare and self-care should not be complicated. He was a Principal at Symplur and a Co-Founder, Advisor, and the Head of Social Strategy and Founding Partner at Better Day Health.
Gaurava Agarwal, MD, is Associate Professor in both the Departments of Medical Education and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He serves as the Chief Wellness Executive for Northwestern Medicine. He also serves as the Director of Faculty Wellness for Northwestern University. Dr. Agarwal is a nationally recognized educator who has won the prestigious Association for Academic Psychiatry Junior Faculty Award, Devneil Vaidya Junior Faculty Teaching Award, White Coat Investor Financial Educator of the Year Award, Illinois Psychiatric Society Educator of the Year, and is the first psychiatrist to win the George H. Joost Award for outstanding clinical teacher from Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He serves as a wellness consultant to multiple national research groups and is a certified leadership, organizational, and well-being coach. Dr. Agarwal specializes in occupational and organizational psychiatry with an emphasis on workplace mental health. He currently serves as the chair of the Behavioral Health Section of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Vice-President of the Academy of Organizational and Occupational Psychiatry, member of the American Hospital Association’s Committee on Clinical Leadership, Chair of the Well-Being and Professional Development Committee for the American College of Physicians Northern Illinois chapter and is on the Advisory Council of the Center for Workplace Mental Health. He created the Scholars of Wellness (SOW), a 2019 Illinois Psychiatric Society Innovation in Physician Wellness Award winning program designed to help address the organizational drivers of physician burnout.
Jonathan Ripp, MD, MPH Professor of Medicine, Medical Education and Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Dean for Well-Being and Resilience and Chief Wellness Officer, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Jonathan Ripp, MD, MPH received both his undergraduate and medical degrees from Yale University and completed internship and residency in Internal Medicine (IM) at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. In the role of chief wellness officer, Dr. Ripp oversees efforts to assess and provide direction for system- and individual-level interventions designed to improve well-being for all students, residents, fellows, and faculty in the Mount Sinai Health System. He is the former Associate Dean of GME for Trainee Well-Being within the ISMMS Office of Graduate Medical Education’s in which capacity he served to help spread well-being initiatives across the training programs of the Mount Sinai Health System. Dr. Ripp also co-founded and is the former Director of the ISMMS Department of Medicine’s Advancing Idealism in Medicine (AIM) Initiative. In the Department of Medicine, Dr. Ripp serves as core faculty for the IM Residency Training Program and faculty in the Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors home-based primary care program. In addition, Dr. Ripp is the Co-founder and Co-Director of CHARM, the Collaborative for Healing and Renewal in Medicine, an international group of medical educators, academic medical center leaders, experts in burnout research, and interventions, and learners all working to promote learner and trainee wellness. Recognized for his leadership in this area, Dr. Ripp has been invited to participate in the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Symposia on Physician Well-Being, join the American College of Physician's Promoting Physician Wellness Task Force and participate in the National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-being and Resilience. Dr. Ripp’s primary research interest is in physician burnout and well-being, for which he has received grant support and has published and lectured widely. His multicenter studies have served to better elucidate the causes and consequences of physician burnout and have explored interventions designed to promote trainee well-being.
Peter J. Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., F.C.C.M., is a world-renowned patient safety champion, innovator, critical care physician, a prolific researcher (publishing over 800 peer review publications), entrepreneur (founding a health care start-up that was acquired), and a global thought leader, informing US and global health policy. His scientific work leveraging checklists to reduce catheter-related bloodstream infections has saved thousands of lives and earned him high-profile accolades, including being named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, receiving a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2008. As Chief Quality & Clinical Transformation Officer, Dr. Pronovost is charged with fostering ideation and implementation for new protocols to eliminate defects in value and thereby enhance quality of care; developing new frameworks for population health management for UH’s more than one million patients; and managing the UH Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Network – one of the nation’s largest – comprising more than 581,000 members. Dr. Pronovost was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2011, elected as Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and has received multiple honorary degrees. Dr. Pronovost is an advisor to the World Health Organizations’ World Alliance for Patient Safety and regularly addresses the U.S. Congress on patient safety issues. In response to a White House executive order, Dr. Pronovost co-chaired the Healthcare Quality Summit to modernize the Department of Health and Human Services quality measurement system.