Tiffany M. Osborn MD, MPH
DEPARTMENT OF SURGERY
Professor of Surgery (General Surgery) and of Emergency Medicine
2023 Dean’s Impact Award Recipient
While serving as Barnes-Jewish Hospital director of sepsis quality improvement and the BJC HealthCare sepsis QI physician champion, Tiffany M. Osborn, MD, MPH, worked with the hospital and health system COVID-19 Incident Command Centers on several projects. As director of the COVID-19 Critical Care Task Force, she enlisted leaders from many disciplines to effectively research, develop, distribute and continually update important clinical guidance utilized across the hospital’s service lines. Ultimately, every guidance Osborn’s team developed became a template for other Hospital Service Organizations across BJC. As COVID-19 clinical demands increased and treatments remained limited, patient care required innovative, progressive strategies. Washington University and Barnes-Jewish led the region by offering convalescent plasma. As director of the COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Program (CCP), Osborn’s team developed workflows, reference tools, EPIC/EMR tools, quality improvement monitoring and process improvement, increasing the number of patients receiving CCP by 150%. Handpicked to oversee a system providing equitable deployment of constrained resources, Osborn developed a Contingency and Crisis Standards of Care Program to be deployed if there were more patients requiring a lifesaving resource than what Washington University and Barnes-Jewish had available. This process required collaboration with key stakeholders across the BJC system, the St. Louis region and the Missouri Hospital Association. Osborn and her team then integrated this work into Barnes-Jewish emergency preparedness as an ongoing program. In addition, Osborn delivered essential health care and advocacy information across the community through more than 50 media appearances including Fox News, CNN, NPR, The Associated Press and local outlets.