People Profiles: Dr. Kathryn Kellogg

Dr. Kate Kellogg (Emergency Medicine) loves to create useful and functional things for other people – things that they might need and that make them feel cared about. That’s one of the reasons she really enjoys glassblowing, a hobby she picked up last year.

Though she admits, with such a fickle medium, things don’t always work out as planned: “It is humbling, and it is really good for a recovering perfectionist because it is very normal that half the things go on the floor.”

Prioritizing the needs of others – particularly their safety – is the focus of Dr. Kellogg’s work as well. As Vice President of Patient Safety and Infection Prevention, Dr. Kellogg is responsible for creating system-wide processes and standards that keep MedStar Health’s patients and employees safe. Over the last four years, much of that work related to COVID-19 as she led the clinical side of the system’s COVID-19 response.

In a teaching hospital where the learners are responsible for so much of the patient care, Dr. Kellogg emphasizes how important prioritizing the needs of MedStar GME’s residents and fellows is to her work. “They’re such a critical group to have invested in safety and also to feel supported by all of our programs,” she explains.

Last year, her team launched one such program called HRO 2.0. In Dr. Kellogg’s words, it aims to “bring everyone into the safety journey with their everyday work.” Residents and fellows can find HRO information and patient safety resources on the HRO Hub on StarPort, including the Safety Moment Library, information on SafetyNet, psychological safety, just culture, and more. The resources on the HRO Hub, including brief videos, one-pagers, and presentations, are meant to support our work and journey towards HRO 2.0.

Also allowing her to stay connected to MedStar Health GME and better understand the needs and challenges of residents is her role on the Graduate Medical Education Committee (GMEC), which she has served in for several years.

In all her interactions with MedStar Health GME, one thing she’s been struck by is how deeply GME leadership cares about its learners, something that is very important to her. “I feel very strongly about the people that we work with feeling included and honored and seen as people. I think that GME leadership really does everything they can to help every one of those 1100 learners feel like they are seen as people,” she says.

Another aspect of Dr. Kellogg’s work with residents and fellows that she is excited about is helping this rising generation of physicians adopt a new perspective when it comes to patient safety – to create a shift from the physician-centric mentality to a team and system approach. “I think that there’s so much opportunity there. And the way that we approach our work is going to be able to be really different going forward than I think it has been over the last 10 years.”