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Dr. David Adams

Dr. David E. Adams is the president and CEO of Adams Strategy Group, Inc.: a specialized consultancy that embeds positive culture using strategic leadership. The Group targets the transformation of leadership approaches, improvement management, and strategy management. David’s expertise lies in embedding positive culture through transformational and positive leadership approaches, human and operations systems balance, operational excellence systems and strategies, and executive coaching. For the past fifteen years, Dr. Adams has focused his work on hospitals and healthcare systems where he has helped clinicians and systems reduce medical errors, a leading cause of death in the United States.

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Latest Writing Projects

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Embedding Safety Culture Using Operational Excellence Principles

Improving patient safety — reducing medical errors — requires deep-rooted organizational change. But, organizational change is tricky; failure rates range from 60 to 90%. One evidence-based approach to changing culture — organizational culture or its byproduct, safety culture — is to couple safety culture interventions with an operational excellence strategy that addresses both the leadership and structural drivers to change. Using operational excellence principles as primary and secondary embedding mechanisms, strategic leaders can sustain and embed safety culture across the enterprise.
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Signature Healthcare's Brockton Hospital

Strategies for Sustained Safety Performance

For more than two decades, the US government and the healthcare industry have been attempting to improve the escalating rate of preventable medical errors. Despite these efforts, medical errors are a leading cause of death in the US. Perhaps the most alarming result of medical errors is preventable deaths, estimated between 250,000 to 400, 000 annually in the US. While most healthcare organizations have adopted some strategy to improve patient safety, the efforts are largely unproductive. This report focuses on an unusual integrated healthcare system that improved and sustained patient safety for more than a decade, responding to the specific problem of strategic leader in healthcare organizations who fail to foster a safety climate and reduce medical errors. The report identifies answers to why strategic leaders failed or succeeded and what factors lead to their success or failure.

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Close up of two surgeons' hands during surgery

Leadership for Reducing Medical Error

(This article was published in a 2022 Special Edition of Measuring Business Excellence, a peer-reviewed journal from Emerald Publishing). Medical errors have become the third leading cause of death in the USA. Two million deaths from preventable medical errors will occur annually worldwide each year. The purpose of this paper was to find themes from the literature relating leadership styles – leadership approaches in practice – with success in reducing medical errors and patient safety. The review found three leadership approaches and four leadership actions connected to successfully reducing medical errors and improving patient safety. The review concluded that leadership appeared to be the preeminent factor in reducing medical errors and improving patient safety. It also found that positive leadership approaches, regardless of the safety intervention, led to improving results and outcomes.

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