Rollin J. (Terry) Fairbanks, MD, is senior vice president and chief quality and safety officer for MedStar Health, overseeing and leading patient safety, infection prevention, and quality of care across the system. He is also executive director of the MedStar Health Institute for Quality and Safety, leading the spread of innovative quality and safety approaches inside and outside of the MedStar Health system, through research, innovation, and education.
Dr. Fairbanks has held evolving leadership roles in Quality and Safety, first serving as MedStar Health’s assistant vice president for Ambulatory Quality and Safety, charged with aligning and optimizing quality and safety efforts in the outpatient setting across the system. In 2019 he assumed system leadership for Quality and Safety, as vice president, and was named chief quality and safety officer in 2021. Preceding these appointments, Dr. Fairbanks served as part of the MedStar Health Institute for Innovation, where he established the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, a unique system safety engineering program that has become one of the largest of its kind in the U.S. During this tenure, Dr. Fairbanks also served as associate director of the MedStar Health Institute for Innovation, and oversaw the MedStar Health Simulation Training and Education Lab (SiTEL).
Prior to joining MedStar Health, Dr. Fairbanks was a National Institutes of Health and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded researcher and an emergency medicine faculty member at the University of Rochester, where he held a number of Emergency Medical Services leadership roles including medical director and regional quality director.
As a board-certified emergency physician, Dr. Fairbanks practices at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, and serves as professor of emergency medicine at Georgetown University. Dr. Fairbanks also holds an academic appointment as adjunct associate professor of industrial systems engineering at the University at Buffalo.
Dr. Fairbanks holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Potsdam College, and a master’s degree in industrial systems engineering/human factors engineering from Virginia Tech. He earned his medical degree from the Medical College of Virginia/Virginia Commonwealth University and completed his emergency medicine residency at the University of Rochester, where he was chief resident. He completed the American Hospital Association/National Patient Safety Foundation Comprehensive Patient Safety Leadership Fellowship and MedStar Leader of the Future: Physician Leadership Development, a leadership development program offered in partnership with the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Fairbanks has served in many national and international advisory roles, including formal consultative roles with the U.S., Australian, British, and Spanish governments. He is a national and international speaker and has contributed to more than 150 publications and co-edited a book on quality and safety topics in health care. Dr. Fairbanks has been listed twice by Becker’s Hospital Review as one of the Top Experts Leading the Field of Patient Safety, and was recently recognized with the 2021 Robert L. Wears Patient Safety Leadership Award and by the Medical Society of the District of Columbia’s John Benjamin Nichols Award. He is a fellow in the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the American College of Emergency Physicians.