Patient safety isn’t about reacting faster, it’s about preventing harm altogether.
In this episode, leaders from medicine, data science, and product design come together to explain how pediatric healthcare systems are evolving to protect children more effectively and more humanely.
Anne Lyren shares how the SPS Network enables hospitals to learn from one another in real time, proving that transparency and collaboration save lives. Rebecca Egger challenges assumptions about early childhood mental health, highlighting how better data can reveal risks long before children fall through the cracks. Manju Dawkins shows how rethinking painful procedures isn’t just about comfort, it’s about dignity, trust, and public health.
This episode makes one thing clear: safer care doesn’t come from heroics. It comes from systems designed with intention.
Key Topics Discussed:
- How children’s hospitals collaborate to reduce serious harm
- Why early childhood mental health has been historically overlooked
- Using data to identify risk earlier and more equitably
- Designing medical experiences that reduce fear and pain
- Moving from reactive care to prevention-first systems
- Why empathy and safety must be built into workflows, not added later
About Anne Lyren:
Anne Lyren is the chief medical and strategy officer of the SPS Network. She is a pediatrician at UH/Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital where she also currently serves as the strategic advisor of the Quality & Safety Program.
Dr. Lyren received her bachelor’s degree at Harvard and a master’s degree in Philosophy as a Rotary Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She then completed medical school at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, her residency and chief residency at Rainbow, and subsequently served as an attending and Director of Rainbow Center for Pediatric Ethics. At Rainbow, she has served in a number of additional roles including Medical Director of Quality, Vice Chair of Quality & Ethics, and Interim Co-Chair of the Department of Pediatrics. In 2010, she completed the IHI Improvement Advisor Course. Since that time, she led the successful Pediatric Surgical Site Infection Improvement Collaborative of the Ohio Children’s Hospitals Solutions for Patient Safety and has co-led the Ohio hospitals in their efforts to eliminate serious harm. In 2011, she joined Dr. Steve Muething as Co-Clinical Director of SPS, a CMS-funded effort to eliminate serious harm in children’s hospitals across the country. In 2017, she transitioned to being the chief medical and strategy officer (formerly titled “clinical director”) of the Network.
About Rebecca Egger:
Rebecca Egger had built an impressive resume bridging the gap between data and real-world impacts. She earned her computer science degree from the University of North Carolina, worked at Palantir, and later at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where she built an open-source platform for tracking infectious disease outbreaks. Her mother, Dr. Helen Egger, has risen to become a leading figure in child psychiatry. Among her most infamous work, is groundbreaking research revealing how children under age five experience significant mental health challenges at rates comparable to adolescence, fundamentally challenging assumptions long shaping clinical care.
About Manju Dawkins:
Board certified dermatologist, Founder and CEO of Thimble, challenger of “this is the way it’s always been done,” and disliker of suffering. Here to raise the standard of care for needle procedures.
Thimble is taking the pain and fear out of shots and blood draws—empowering patients and their care teams, dramatically improving public health, and paving the way for greater empathy across the entire healthcare experience.
