View: Recent Awards || All Awards

October 23, 2024

Dr. Sanjay Saint named recipient of Under Secretary’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Health Services Research

Dr. Sanjay Saint

Dr. Sanjay Saint, chief of medicine at the VA Ann Arbor Health Care System in Michigan, was named the recipient of the Under Secretary’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Health Services Research.

Dr. Saint’s VA career has been supported by numerous grants, totaling over $40 million.  This highlights his ability to understand those factors affecting Veterans’ health, consider the Veteran’s perspective, leverage insight from frontline clinicians, and harness the power of team science.   He is an international expert in patient safety, particularly in preventing hospital-acquired complications, and is a living demonstration that when the entire hospital community works together, they can have a global impact. 

What began as work on urinary catheters extended to infection prevention and eventually a broad field of patient safety.  This has led to over 400 peer-reviewed papers, in such prestigious publications as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Dr. Saint has even written for The Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review and co-authored multiple books on medicine and health.  His book, “Preventing Hospital Infections: Real-World Problems, Realistic Solutions”  has been translated into multiple languages, such as French, Italian, and Japanese.
Dr. Saint is also a current and long-standing member of the Investigator Leadership Council at the Ann Arbor Health Systems Research Center of Innovation, and founder of Ann Arbor’s Clinical Research Mentoring Program.  Not only has this program supported over 30 faculty at VA’s Ann Arbor facility, but it’s also doubled the funding over the last eight years.  He also serves on 14 mentorship committees and even chairs six of them. 

In addition to multiple international honors, Dr. Saint was presented the Health System Impact Award in 2017, one of the highest honors the health system can bestow upon a health services researcher.