Benjamin Jacobs, M.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery, has recently been promoted to the role of chief quality officer for UF Health Shands.
In his new position, Jacobs will oversee quality and patient safety improvement efforts across UF Health Shands hospital locations in the Greater Gainesville region and lead the Sebastian Ferraro Office of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety. In collaboration with physician, nursing and administrative leaders, he will help advance clinical excellence, improve patient outcomes and strengthen the patient experience across all care settings.
In his current roles as assistant chair for performance improvement and physician director of quality for the University of Florida Department of Surgery, Jacobs has led efforts to strengthen accountability, enhance patient safety processes and improve clinical and operational outcomes.
Jacobs was selected for the chief quality officer position in part due to his thoughtful leadership style, collaborative approach and dedication to academic medicine’s missions of patient care, education and research. Meeting those missions has necessarily required collaboration far outside the Department of Surgery.
“What I’ve done so far has always been at the intersection of surgery and other disciplines,” Jacobs said. “Eighty percent of surgical care isn’t in the operating room; a lot of it is multidisciplinary and is being provided by nurses, endocrinologists, interventional radiologists and so many other types of medical specialists.”
As the physician director of quality for the Department of Surgery, Jacobs has been responsible for coordinating with all those moving parts to identify areas to improve service.
“We’re going to continue building those relationships and recognizing that every phase of care, inside and outside the operating room, deeply matters to our patients,” he said.
That commitment to quality was recently honored by the Society for Vascular Surgery Vascular Quality Initiative, with UF one of only six institutions recognized with the inaugural Dr. Larry Kraiss Quality Award.
Jacobs is also proud of his work in the department, from creating more formal peer review processes to growing the periprocedural quality and patient safety committee.
“These are more than requirements for accreditation,” he said. “Proactive approaches to quality are a cornerstone of good surgical practice. That includes having frank conversations about how to make meaningful improvements for our patients.”
As he looks ahead to his new role, Jacobs knows creating an environment conducive to change will be one of his top priorities.
“It’s often said that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets,” he said. “I think about that a lot. If you want outstanding results, you have to design a system that gets outstanding results. That means change, and change can make people uncomfortable.”
Jacobs said a large part of his role will entail not only designing that change but building consensus.
“We need everybody on the same page, pulling in the same direction and saying, ‘Yes, this change is one worth making,’” he said.
Jacobs, building that consensus is made easier thanks to the quality of people he works with.
“Part of the reason I’ve been successful in the roles I’ve had so far is because everybody in the department wants everybody else to succeed,” he said. “For some of us that’s the advancement of clinical science and for some of us that’s quality administration, but the support is universal. I really do work with the best people in the world.”
Building new systems and improving quality at a large hospital like UF Health Shands is no small task, but Jacobs describes himself as a lifelong optimist.
“I want us to be the best Department of Surgery in the country, the best university medical center in the country and the best medical school in the country,” he said. “I just can’t see why any of those things won’t be true in two or three years.”