Charles Denham, MD

Founder and Chairman, Texas Medical Institute of Technology; CEO of HCC Corporation; Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow, Harvard University; and Co-founder of the Global Patient Safety Forum

Dr. Charles Denham's business development career, spanning 30 years, has resulted in numerous product and process innovations. He was ranked 38th in the 2012 list of "50 Most Influential Physician Executives in Healthcare" by Modern Healthcare and is a collaborator with the World Health Organization. As a radiation oncologist, associate professor of biomedical engineering and instructor at a number of medical schools and business schools, he has taught innovation adoption and technology transfer and commercialization. He has authored more than 100 publications and was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Patient Safety from 2011 to 2014. Denham has been an adjunct Professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Health Systems Engineering and lecturer with the Harvard Medical School. He was a Senior Fellow of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative 2009-2011 and an instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2009. He is a member of the President's Circle of the National Academies of Science of the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He is a co-founder of the Global Patient Safety Forum, a convener of global healthcare leaders.

CEO and Founder, HCC Corporation: A business development accelerator, HCC has led, developed, or supported 400 product development teams in more than 50 product categories, including pharmaceuticals, devices, capital equipment and health information technologies. Its mission is to save lives, save money and create value in the communities and ventures it builds. HCC developed an evidence-based Breakthrough Technology Processing System now used for product contracting by many U.S. hospitals. The HCC accelerator incubates ventures that span from projects with Global 10 companies to start-up ventures. The core values of HCC are integrity, compassion, accountability, reliability and entrepreneurship (ICARE).

Chairman and Founder, TMIT: TMIT is a non-profit medical research organization driving adoption of healthcare performance-improvement solutions. The TMIT National Research Test Bed of leaders and caregivers in more than 3,100 hospitals that has organically grown from the Premier Innovation Institute of 1,700 hospitals co-founded and co-led by Denham in the 1990s that was ultimately spun out to his organization to run independently. The mission of TMIT is identical to that of HCC's, which has been the major funder of TMIT over the years. TMIT and HCC are served by more than 500 clinical and administrative subject matter experts from a number of our nation's best academic and front-line institutions, as well as industry innovators from multiple sectors. This network of experts has been built over 30 years. TMIT Communities of Practice are served by online knowledge management systems found at www.SafetyLeaders.org TMIT has established national and statewide collaborative programs in performance improvement, in association with groups such as state hospital associations and their members. TMIT produced the 2010 award-winning documentary, Chasing Zero: Winning the War on Healthcare Harm, on the Discovery Channel. TMIT's 2012 documentary, Surfing the Healthcare Tsunami: Bring Your Best Board, focuses on hospital governance, administrative, medical and community leadership. The cause is to move the market from “provider-centered, volume-driven transactions to patient-centered value-driven care.”

Responding to a need expressed by patient advocates, in 2011 TMIT launched SpeakerLink®, a free matching system to link patient/family speakers with hospital “seekers” who are interested in bringing patients and families in to their quality programs to help put the focus on patient safety and performance improvement. Denham founded pilot programs that are still in their infancy, including CareMoms™, CareKids™ and CareUniversity™, which are focused on helping families survive healthcare harm and waste.

NQF Safe Practices for Better Healthcare R&D Leadership: TMIT has led a continuous program through its Research Test Bed to provide input to the performance improvement community. This includes input to the National Quality Forum on adoption of the Safe Practices for Better Healthcare. Denham was the co-chair of the Safe Practices Maintenance committee through 2010. He is a former Chairman of the Safe Practices Program of The Leapfrog Group that has measured the adoption of certain safe practices.

Dr. Denham donates his speaking fees to TMIT to support patient safety advocate and research programs.