Saul Weiner, MD
Dr. Weiner is Deputy Director of the Center of Innovation for Complex Chronic Health Care and Professor of Medicine, Pediatrics and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has served as Medical Education Dean, University Vice Provost and currently is Senior Advisor to the Provost. Dr. Weiner’s research focuses on identifying and preventing contextual errors in clinical decision making and care planning. He has developed strategies for identifying contextual errors, measuring their impact on health outcomes and costs, and on preventing them. His research extensively employs unannounced standardized patients, patients who audio record their visits, and clinical decision support tools enhanced with contextual information in the electronic medical record. He currently leads studies funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Weiner is the University of Illinois at Chicago 2013 Distinguished Researcher of the Year in the Clinical Sciences. His 2017 book Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2023) received the American Publishers Award for Professional & Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in the life sciences from the American Association of Publishers. His most recent book, On Becoming a Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring About Your Patients, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Dr. Weiner’s research has been translated into practice in a variety of settings, including a VHA national quality improvement program to increase attention to Veteran life context in care planning, and an initiative to improve care and services to homeless veterans in over 30 cities. Dr. Weiner is a graduate of Harvard College, and Dartmouth Medical School. He completed his residency at the University of Chicago, and is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar.
Contact: Saul.Weiner@va.gov
