ECRI Leaders Named Becker's Patient Safety Experts to Know – Again

For the second consecutive year, ECRI President and CEO Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD, and Shannon Kooker, Vice President of Clinical Excellence and Patient Safety, have both been named to the Becker's Hospital Review 2026 list of Patient Safety Experts to Know.

The annual list recognizes leaders across the U.S. who are driving meaningful improvements in care quality, reducing patient harm, and shaping the future of healthcare safety. This year's honorees include executives from leading hospitals, health systems, academic medicine, and national quality and safety organizations.

Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD

ECRI’s President and CEO

Dr. Schabacker leads ECRI's mission to reduce preventable harm in healthcare and advance safe, equitable and accessible healthcare worldwide. He is a national thought leader on patient safety and healthcare technology, and a passionate advocate for health equity and evidence-based medicine. Read more about Dr. Schabacker

“ECRI is wholly, unapologetically focused on patient safety and care quality. Every dataset we analyze, every recommendation we publish, every partner we serve, all of it is oriented toward answering a single question: how can a healthcare system reliably and sustainably reduce preventable harm and provide safe, evidence-based care? That drives everything we do. It’s no small feat, but the ECRI team has risen to the challenge.” – Dr. Schabacker 

Shannon Kooker, MSN, RN, CPPS, CIC, CPHQ, FAPIC

ECRI’s Vice President of Clinical Excellence and Patient Safety

Shannon Kooker leads one of the nation's largest patient safety organizations, the ECRI and ISMP Patient Safety Organization (PSO), which serves all 50 states. She pioneered ECRI's Safe Systems Solution to prevent patient harm and partner with care providers and leaders to re-design systems to be reliably safe, efficient, and resilient. Under her leadership, ECRI's database of safety incidents has grown to the largest of its kind in the industry, with over 8 million events analyzed, plus over 6,000 root cause analyses (RCAs). She has played a pivotal role in national efforts to advance patient safety, such as the development of the CMS safety structural measure.