Susan Edgman-Levitan, PA, is a fierce advocate of patient-centered healthcare who has tirelessly devoted herself to understanding patients' perspectives and tailoring information to their needs. She is executive director of the John D. Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital and is founding president of the Picker Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit survey, research, and consulting firm focusing on the assessment and improvement of patient and family-centered care.

She has published extensively on research and strategies to improve the patients' experience, as an editor of The CAHPS Improvement Guide and Through the Patient's Eyes, a book on creating and sustaining patient-centered care; and she has authored many papers and other publications on patient-centered care, including the Institute of Medicine's 2006 report, The Future of Drug Safety: Promoting and Protecting the Health of the Public.

In addition to being a lecturer in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate in health policy at Harvard Medical School, she has been the co-principal investigator on the Harvard Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS) study from 1995 to the present and is the IHI Fellow for Patient and Family-Centered Care.

Susan Edgman-Levitan serves on several boards and national advisory committees, including the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, the National Patient Safety Foundation, the National Health Services Corps Advisory Council, and the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, and is a member of the Lucian Leape Institute. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Duke University Physician Assistant Program where she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Duke Physician Assistant Program and was inducted into the Duke University Medical Center Hall of Fame in 2004. Ms. Edgman-Levitan was awarded the 2007 Leadership and Innovation Award from the Center for Information Therapy.

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