Dr. Nagamine is a hospitalist physician at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Santa Clara, Calif., where she previously was a quality chief and safety officer. She is a member of the National Quality Forum Patient Safety Complications Steering Committee, an SHM board member, and a member of SHM’s Hospital Quality and Patient Safety Committee, which she chaired for four years.
Undergraduate education: University of Hawaii, Honolulu.
Medical school: University of Hawaii.
Notable: In the early stages of the patient-safety movement, Dr. Nagamine worked with aviation-safety experts and Kaiser colleagues to develop innovative patient-safety programs. She has led numerous quality-improvement (QI) projects, including the development of a patient-safety curriculum for staff and anonymous reporting mechanisms that focus on identifying problems in the system rather than focusing simply on individuals. For her efforts, she was awarded SHM’s Clinical Award of Excellence in 2002.
After leading many other QI initiatives on a national level, she was named a Senior Fellow in Hospital Medicine in 2010. Dr. Nagamine has been with SHM’s Project BOOST since its inception, serving on the advisory board and as a mentor. She says the SFHM designation acknowledges that she has contributed to hospital medicine in a meaningful way.
FYI: A doctor who enjoys creative projects outside of the workplace, Dr. Nagamine is working on a documentary about her father’s struggles as a World War II soldier and a poor immigrant starting a new life in California.
Quotable: “Creating a culture of safety and transparency allows us to get real about the fact that we’re human and fallible. Ultimately, we get much more information about where the problems are and how to fix them.”