John T. James, Ph.D.

founder, Patient Safety America
john.t.james@earthlink.net

​I have been a patient safety activist for 14 years since the death of my 19-year old son due to profoundly uninformed and unethical care in his college town. His story is told in A Sea of Broken Hearts, which I published in 2007. In 2013, I wrote a seminal article published in the Journal of Patient Safety, in which I estimated that 440,000 Americans die prematurely each year because of preventable events initiated in hospitals. In 2014 I was invited to testify to a Senate Subcommittee on medical errors. I co-edited a book that was published in 2015 called The Truth about Big Medicine, in which many chapters were written by my Safe Patient Project colleagues. One of my current goals is to improve the rights patients have while hospitalized by making changes in federal regulations.