V icki Lewis, PhD
Dr. Lewis joined ECRI in 2023 after working as a healthcare consultant with hospitals, outpatient facilities, and home care organizations. Dr. Lewis has extensive experience applying the safety science of human factors engineering to complex work systems in the surface transportation and healthcare domains. She has an established research portfolio directing, collaborating, managing, and consulting on topics including healthcare-associated infections, usability of medical technology, evaluation of root cause analysis effectiveness, and safety process improvement.
Dr. Lewis has a track record of designing and developing the useful and usable design of medical devices and Health IT. She is practiced in facilitating sentinel event analyses to identify root causes of adverse events and develop system-based solutions that maximize effective and sustainable safety solutions.
Before launching Healthcare Safety Strategies, LLC, Dr. Lewis was the Associate Director of the MedStar National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in Washington DC. Prior to taking this key leadership role, she was at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) where she was Director of the VTTI Center for Vehicle-Infrastructure Safety.
There she focused on the application of Human Factors Systems Engineering methods to improve safety issues directly applicable to healthcare, such as fatigue, distraction, and the evaluation of information and warning systems. Dr. Lewis has received more than $21 million as PI and $5.5 million as Co-PI in research sponsorship from federal, state, industrial, and private sponsors. She has over 125 scientific publications including national and international standards and book chapters. Dr. Lewis received her Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering with a Human Factors Engineering option from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
