Richard T. Griffey, MD, MPH

Associate Professor, Emergency Medicine

Richard Griffey Lab
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Bio

Dr. Griffey holds bachelors degrees from Vanderbilt University in English Literature and Psychology (with honors), graduating in 1989.  He earned his doctorate in medicine from Eastern Virginia Medical School in 1997 and completed the four-year emergency medicine residency in the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals.  After residency, he joined the faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, also working in the Department  of Radiology’s Center for Evidence-Based Imaging, and in 2004 completed a Masters in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.  Dr. Griffey joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007 as Associate Division Chief of Emergency Medicine at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.  He has completed the Institute for Public Health’s Patient Safety Officer program and the Comprehensive Patient Safety Leadership Fellowship sponsored by the American Hospital Association and the National Patient Safety Foundation.  Dr. Griffey is a scholar and faculty at the Washington University Institute for Public Health, where he is coursemaster for “Patient Safety, Quality Evaluation and Quality Improvement” which includes medical student, resident, fellow, junior faculty and pre-doctoral candidate learners.

For over a decade, Dr. Griffey has been engaged in national efforts related to performance measurement in emergency medicine.  He has held multiple leadership positions in emergency medicine specialty societies including past chair of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Section and current vice-chair of ACEP’s Quality and Patient Safety Committee.  Dr. Griffey is on the steering committee for ACEP’s Qualified Clinical Data Registry, the Clinical Emergency Data Registry (CEDR), and chairs the Data Integrity and Research Subcommittee.  Dr. Griffey has represented the College on multiple technical advisory panels at the American College of Radiology and at national organizations related to quality measurement including the National Quality Forum and the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI).

Dr. Griffey’s research interests are in the areas of patient safety and quality and the impact of information systems on performance improvement.  specific areas of interest include evidence based imaging and radiation, health literacy and health communications, quality measurement and quality improvement in health care, and implementation science.  Dr. Griffey  has led and contributed a range of studies that explore gaps in quality and safety in the ED, and has developed and evaluated interventions to close these gaps.  Dr. Griffey is the author of numerous publications and is a frequent lecturer.  He is a reviewer for major journals in emergency medicine, serves on study sections at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and is on the editorial board of Academic Emergency Medicine.  Dr. Griffey has funding from the AHRQ, the Washington University Center for Diabetes Translation Research (NIH/NIDDK) and the Barnes Jewish Hospital Foundation.  Current work focuses on improvement in the management of diabetic ketoacidosis in the ED and the hospital and the refining and testing of a novel ED trigger tool for identifying all-cause harm in the ED.