Board of Directors

President

Dr. Andrew Olson is a Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he practices hospital medicine and pediatrics. A graduate of Luther College and the  University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, Dr. Olson completed his internship in Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and his residency in Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. He serves as the founding Director of the Division of Hospital Medicine within the Department of Medicine.  Dr. Olson serves as the Director of Medical Education Research and Innovation in the Medical Education Outcomes Center, focusing on linking education with clinical and workforce outcomes.  He has had multiple roles in medical education and clinical leadership throughout his career, including developing new medical school courses and clerkships, leading faculty development programs, and helping lead the health system’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Olson served as the medical director for Minnesota’s stand-alone COVID-19 hospital.

Dr. Olson’s academic focus is better understanding clinical reasoning, especially diagnostic reasoning. His research focuses on the interactions between individuals and the clinical environment and how teams make diagnostic decisions.  He is the author of over 120 articles, mostly about clinical reasoning and diagnostic excellence.  He has chaired multiple international meetings focused on diagnostic excellence, serves on journal editorial boards, and has sustained grant funding focused on diagnosis and clinical reasoning.  He is the 2024 recipient of the Mark L Graber Diagnostic Safety Award. Outside the hospital, Andrew enjoys time with his spouse and three daughters, including visiting national parks, hiking, and going to baseball games.

Treasurer

Mark L Graber, MD, FACP is the leading authority internationally on diagnostic error and how to address it. He is the founder of the annual Diagnostic Error in Medicine conference series, the journal, DIAGNOSIS, and is the founder of both The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) and now The Community Improving Diagnosis in Medicine (CIDM).

In 2014 he received the John M Eisenberg Award from The Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum, the nation’s top honor in patient safety and quality for originating Patient Safety Awareness Week, and establishing the new field of diagnostic safety.

Secretary

Dr. Verity Schaye is an Associate Professor of Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine where she practices as a hospitalist at Bellevue Hospital. She completed her medical school and residency training at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and her Masters in Health Professions Education at Maastricht University. She serves as the Assistant Dean for Education in the Clinical Sciences overseeing the clinical curriculum and assessment program at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She also serves as the Assistant Director for Curricular Innovation in the Institute for Innovations in Medical Education. 

Dr. Schaye’s academic focus is on integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the teaching and assessment of clinical reasoning. She has been grant funded by the NBME Stemmler fund to support this work focusing on AI assessment of clinical reasoning documentation. More recently, she was selected as a 2024-2025 National Academy of Medicine Scholar in Diagnostic Excellence focusing on developing a Large Language Model-based diagnostic performance feedback system for internal medicine residents. She has authored numerous publications in this domain.

Dr. Schaye has been a member of the Diagnosis community for over a decade and served as a leader in this field. She was a prior fellow in Diagnostic Excellence in the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine as well as Chair of the 2023 Diagnostic Error in Medicine meeting. She also currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Diagnosis.

Dr. Christina L. Cifra is a health services and patient safety researcher focused on understanding and advancing diagnostic excellence across the spectrum of pediatric acute and critical care. She completed pediatric critical care fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and received quality improvement training at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.

A National Academy of Medicine scholar in diagnostic excellence, Dr. Cifra has published foundational studies on diagnostic error epidemiology and diagnosis-focused ethnography in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and CRICO. Clinically, Dr. Cifra has led numerous diagnostic safety initiatives including the implementation of a structured feedback system between the PICU and emergency departments across rural Iowa and use of a diagnostic timeout tool to improve identification and mitigation of diagnostic uncertainty in PICU patients.

Dr. Cifra has also facilitated wider recognition and support for diagnostic safety research through authorship of several papers proposing a unified research agenda for diagnostic safety in critical medicine and detailing the current state and future directions of the field in pediatrics and beyond. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for Diagnosis, the leading journal in the field. She was an active participant in the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine since 2013, where she chaired the Research Committee and Conference Abstract Committee for many years.

Io Dolka, MS, BCPA, is a Board‑Certified Professional Patient Advocate and founder of GreyZone Health, a medical advocacy practice that supports adults with rare, multisystem, and diagnostically challenging conditions. She uses a patient‑centered, evidence‑informed approach to shorten diagnostic timelines and improve care coordination. Her methods draw on practical experience in biotechnology and diagnostics, and on a decade‑long personal experience with complex illness, which reinforced the value of persistent inquiry, careful review and synthesis of medical records, and collaborative clinician–patient problem solving. Her clinical focus includes autonomic and neuroendocrine presentations such as dysautonomias, long‑COVID, POTS, adrenal insufficiency, and pituitary disorders, where diagnostic ambiguity is common and coordinated advocacy can improve access to appropriate subspecialty evaluation and management.

Io’s contributions extend beyond individual casework to credentialing, organizational development, and multi‑stakeholder efforts to reduce diagnostic error. She co‑founded the Washington State Health Advocacy Association (now HealthAdvocateX) and served on the founding steering committee of the Patient Advocate Certification Board, co‑chairing the ethics and legal taskforce that helped establish the Board‑Certified Patient Advocate credential. She had been active with the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine through the Patient Engagement and Practice Improvement Committees since 2015. She also served on the Diagnostic Process Workgroup of the Washington Patient Safety Coalition where she actively worked on developing a tool to help prepare patients for care provider visits, and contributed in the production of ongoing educational webinar series including a two‑year collaboration with Kaiser Permanente and the Washington State Medical Association to raise awareness of the diagnostic process, share best practices in diagnostic‑error detection, and promote patient engagement as a strategy to mitigate diagnostic error. Io’s invited presentations and writings address patient engagement in diagnosis, rare‑disease diagnostic pathways, telemedicine, and diagnostic disparities, including a 2025 review of patient engagement in diagnosis.

Dr. Traber Giardina is a health services and patient safety researcher focused on advancing diagnostic safety through patient-centered approaches and equity-focused interventions. With expertise in qualitative methodology and mixed-methods research, she investigates how patients' experiences can reveal diagnostic errors and inform improvements in healthcare delivery.

Dr. Giardina's research has been supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Veterans Health Administration. As a National Academy of Medicine Scholar in Diagnostic Excellence, she has led studies examining patient-reported diagnostic errors and served as Co-Principal Investigator on AHRQ's Patient-Partnered Diagnostic Center of Excellence, which embedded patient perspectives into diagnostic safety initiatives. Her work has demonstrated innovative approaches to harnessing patient complaints, medical record reviews, and patient portal interactions to detect diagnostic safety concerns.

Her scholarship includes foundational contributions to identify diagnostic error and understanding its impact on underserved populations. Dr. Giardina has published extensively on patient engagement in diagnostic safety, diagnostic communication, and the use of electronic health records to improve diagnosis. In collaboration with health systems, she has implemented tools that invite patients to identify potential diagnostic issues through structured review of their visit notes.

Since 2017, Dr. Giardina has been a member of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, serving on the Patient Engagement Committee and helping develop educational resources for integrating patient voices into diagnostic safety efforts.

Dr David Meyers is an emergency physician and physician executive. He received his MD degree from Temple University in Philadelphia and trained in internal medicine at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, IL. Board certified in both internal medicine and emergency medicine, over his 40+ year career he served as Chief of Emergency Medicine at numerous hospitals from small, rural and critical-access facilities to major urban trauma centers, including Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, where he has been a member of the medical staff since 1994. He also served as Chief of the Medical Practice Division of EmCare, Inc, a national physician practice management organization, where his responsibilities included oversight of quality of care, professional liability risk and claims management and EHR implementation for 7,000+ clinicians at several hundred hospitals. His current activities focus on patient safety, harm reduction and the patient experience, the quality of health care, institutional and clinical ethics consultations and pre-clinical education.

Dr. Taro Shimizu is an internist and diagnostician and serves as Professor and Chair of Diagnostic Medicine at Dokkyo Medical University in Japan. His clinical practice focuses on patients with acute illness and diagnostically challenging presentations, which has shaped his scholarly interest in how diagnostic thinking is structured and applied in complex clinical environments.

Dr. Shimizu’s academic work centers on diagnostic strategy, with particular attention to making clinicians’ cognitive processes explicit, examinable, and transferable across clinical contexts. His work also engages with questions at the intersection of diagnostic strategy and artificial intelligence, particularly how explicit clinical thinking can shape the effective use of AI in diagnostic practice and calibration. He regularly serves as a case discussant in clinical problem-solving conferences at academic institutions in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and provides ongoing staff-level, case-based teaching at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Johns Hopkins University.

He served as the founding chair of Diagnosis Insight Asia, the first international conference in Asia dedicated to advancing diagnostic practice, held in 2024. He has also contributed to international patient safety initiatives, including planning activities related to World Health Organization programs. He has served as principal investigator on nationally funded research projects focused on scalable approaches to improving diagnostic practice. 

Dr. Shimizu is the sole board member of CIDM based in the Asia-Pacific region. He serves on the editorial boards of Diagnosis and BMJ Case Reports. He is the author of The Art of Diagnostic Strategy, which synthesizes his clinical, educational, and research work into a structured framework for advancing clinical reasoning and diagnostic practice. In recognition of his contributions to the field, he received the Mark L. Graber Diagnostic Quality Award in 2025.

Dr. Laura Zwaan is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Medical Education Research Rotterdam (iMERR) at Erasmus MC, The Netherlands. Trained in cognitive psychology and epidemiology, she leads a multidisciplinary research group focused on understanding and improving diagnostic reasoning, diagnostic error, and—more recently—human–AI collaboration in clinical decision-making.

Her research integrates a broad range of quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how clinicians arrive at diagnostic decisions and how these processes can be optimized to enhance diagnostic safety and accuracy across healthcare settings. Dr. Zwaan’s work has contributed to advancing the science of diagnosis and informing educational and system-level interventions aimed at reducing diagnostic harm. Dr. Zwaan has received multiple competitive research grants and international awards, including the prestigious Veni and Vidi grants from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). 

She initiated the European Diagnostic Error in Medicine (DEM) conferences and served as founding chair of the first conference in Rotterdam (2016), as well as co-chair of the conference in Bern, Switzerland (2018). In addition, Dr. Zwaan has been an active leader within the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM), serving on the DEM conference organizing committee for eight years (2011–2018) and as Chair of the SIDM Research Committee (2015–2017). For her significant contributions to improve diagnostic safety, she was awarded the Mark Graber in 2021.