The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) is happy to announce that Jana O’Hara, MSN, RN, CPHQ, CPPS has joined the staff as Director of Consulting and Education. Jana has held a wide variety of clinical, quality, and safety roles, and most recently served as Director of Marketplace Operations for a healthcare staffing company, leading clinical and non-clinical teams that supported frontline practitioners across the country.
Prior to that, Jana was the Director of Patient Safety for University Health in San Antonio, Texas, overseeing patient safety across the entire healthcare system. She was responsible for continuous quality improvement and building a safety culture for a 700-bed inpatient hospital, ambulatory care clinics with telehealth capability, ambulatory surgery centers, outpatient dialysis centers, home care service, and correctional facilities.
Jana has led multidisciplinary teams and overseen safety for large-scale efforts such as system-wide electronic healthcare record implementation. She is a Certified Professional in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality, a six sigma yellow belt, and has earned a Patient Safety Certificate from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute.
ISMP also wished two longtime nurse leaders well as they entered retirement this year. Both Susan Paparella, MSN, RN, former Vice President of ISMP Services, and Michelle Mandrack, MSN, RN, former Director of Consulting Services, spent more than 22 years with ISMP and helped develop and shape many of its flagship programs, including the Medication Safety Intensive workshops and the consulting service line. They also were instrumental in organizing a number of multidisciplinary national summits, which resulted in the development of groundbreaking recommendations for healthcare practitioners to advance medication safety, including guidelines for the use of automated dispensing cabinets, smart pumps, and IV push medication administration.
“ISMP is proud to be an interdisciplinary organization and we feel that it is crucial to have the nursing perspective represented on our staff,” says ISMP President Rita K. Jew, PharmD, MBA, BCPPS, FASHP. “Susan Paparella and Michelle Mandrack have made so many invaluable contributions to ISMP as well as to the field of patient safety, and they will be incredibly missed.”
For more about Jana, visit: https://hubs.la/Q02RKtNf0
Contact
Renee Brehio, Medication Safety Analyst and Editor, rbrehio@ismp.org
About the Institute for Safe Medication Practices
The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) is the nation’s first 501c (3) nonprofit organization devoted entirely to preventing medication errors. ISMP is known and respected for its medication safety information. For more than 30 years, it also has served as a vital force for progress. ISMP’s advocacy work alone has resulted in numerous necessary changes in clinical practice, public policy, and drug labeling and packaging. Among its many initiatives, ISMP runs the only national voluntary practitioner medication error reporting program, publishes newsletters with real-time error information read and trusted throughout the global healthcare community, and offers a wide range of unique educational programs, tools, and guidelines. In 2020, ISMP formally affiliated with ECRI to create one of the largest healthcare quality and safety entities in the world, and ECRI and the ISMP PSO is a federally certified patient safety organization by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As an independent watchdog organization, ISMP receives no advertising revenue and depends entirely on charitable donations, educational grants, newsletter subscriptions, and volunteer efforts to pursue its life-saving work. Visit www.ismp.org and follow @ismp_org to learn more.
