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Dr. Daniel Hall
Dr. Daniel Hall, staff surgeon at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System and medical director of the Surgical Pause program, is the winner of the Under Secretary’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Health Services Research.
Dr. Hall’s training as a general surgeon and as an ordained priest of the Episcopal Church give him a unique interest in ethics and a commitment to excellence in Veterans’ health, resulting in a body of work that emphasizes real-world impacts. In particular, his work focuses on improving surgical care for frail patients, leading him and his colleagues to develop a groundbreaking approach known as the Surgical Pause.
The surgical pause briefly screens Veterans using a tool developed by Hall and his team to quickly identify frailty at the bedside, which triggers a short period of time for clinicians and patients to ensure the recommended surgery and its after-affects align with the patient’s life goals and won’t cause further harm. The surgical pause has proven to increase survival, reduce complications and ICU admissions, and lower costs, all while providing the best patient-centered care.
With Dr. Hall’s leadership, the surgical pause has not only been adopted nationally by VA, but also by a growing number of private sector health systems across the United States and throughout the world. The frailty assessment tool is now available through multiple electronic health records across the country and has been translated into multiple languages internationally. It’s also the first quality program to be adopted by the National Surgery Office in over 30 years.
For this work, Dr. Hall has been recognized with numerous awards and accolades, including the Eisenberg Award in Patient Safety and Quality from the National Quality forum and Joint Commission. The American Board of Surgery has even included a core question based on Dr. Hall’s work for their national recertification program.
Dr. Hall has also made a tremendous impact on the next generation of investigators and clinicians, serving as a formal mentor to many undergraduate, medical school, graduate, resident physicians, junior faculty, and as an informal mentor to colleagues both in and out of the VA. His focus on characterizing trajectories of recovery after surgery and understanding the social determinants of surgical outcomes helps equip Veterans and their surgeons with the information needed to ensure surgical treatment is aligned with their goals. Truly, Dr. Hall’s work shows a commitment to providing the best care possible to Veterans, for the entirety of their lives in service of health and human flourishing.