Vineet M. Arora, MD, MAPP
Photo: Vineet M. Arora

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Elected 2017

Dr. Arora is Associate Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean for Scholarship & Discovery Director of the GME Clinical Learning Environment Innovation at University of Chicago. She is a leader in testing novel educational and systems-based interventions to improve clinical learning and patient care in teaching hospitals. Her seminal research contributions include understanding and improving patient handoffs, managing resident fatigue during long shifts, and improving patient sleep in hospitals. She is an internationally recognized expert in patient handoffs. She was the first to describe how poor handoffs harm patients and create a reliable valid assessment of handoff communication, which is the most frequently cited handoff assessment worldwide. Her process improvement model for teaching hospitals to standardize handoffs is 1 of only 3 citations in the national accreditation guide for how teaching hospitals should improve their clinical learning environments. In addition to handoffs, Dr. Arora has led landmark studies on how to manage acute and chronic sleep deprivation in residency. Many of her studies on these areas are cited in the 2009 Institute of Medicine Report on Resident Duty Hours and were influential in national decisions to implement work hour restrictions and handoff training and assessment in 2011. She has also made seminal contributions to studying and improving sleep for hospitalized patients. Using objective measures, she has shown patients receive 2 hours less sleep in the hospital each night, and that even this sleep loss is associated with clinically significant risks of cardiometabolic disturbances such as increased blood pressure and “hyperglycemia of hospitalization.” Dr. Arora is currently principal investigator of several federally funded trials, including SIESTA: Sleep for Inpatients: Empowering Staff to Act, which tests a novel value-improvement framework to empower frontline staff to improve inpatient sleep. Her newest work focuses on teaching and improving value in academic teaching hospitals.

Honors / awards

National Academy of Medicine (2019)