Dan France, PhD, MPH
Dr. France is a Research Professor of Anesthesiology, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He is a faculty member and research scientist in Vanderbilt’s Center for Research and Innovation in Systems Safety (CRISS). He was hired by Vanderbilt’s first Chief Quality Officer in 2000 and served as the Assistant Director of Vanderbilt’s Center for Improving Patient Safety (subsumed by CRISS), and as a past member of the Executive Safety Council and Risk Management and Patient Safety Committee before joining CRISS in 2005. Dr. France earned a doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Public Health from the University of Utah. He also received advanced training in Healthcare Delivery Improvement from Intermountain Health Care in Salt Lake City, Utah. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, Dr. France worked as a systems engineer for the Department of Defense and private defense contractors. His professional focus is in health systems engineering and his primary research aims are to model and explain the relationships between hospital system design and function, provider performance, and patient safety. Dr. France is particularly interested in applying knowledge from other high-risk industries and methods from human factors, systems engineering, and biomedical informatics to study and improve operational efficiency and individual and team performance in complex, high-risk clinical environments. His research has been supported by grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundations, Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, Veteran’s Health Administration, and BlueCross and BlueShield of Tennessee.