James Calvin
Room E6-117, Victoria Hospital
t. 519.663.3892
e. James.Calvin@lhsc.on.ca
Publications
Dr Calvin is currently the Richard Ivey Chair of Medicine at Western University and Chair/Chief of the Department of Medicine, a position he has held since 2013. He is also the interim Director for the Centre for Quality, Innovation and Safety (CQuInS) at Western University and since November 2019, past-president of the Canadian Association of Professors of Medicine.
Having completed his MD at Dalhousie University in 1975, he completed his residency in Ottawa and London, at Western University, before going to San Francisco for two years to be a research fellow at the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California. He held faculty positions in Cardiology in Ottawa before moving to Chicago in 1991 where he held a number of senior leadership roles in Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine at both Cook County Hospital and Rush University Medical Centre until 2013.
Dr Calvin has a long history in healthcare research, improvement and process redesign of care delivery systems from his experience of leading Cardiology services in the U.S. and in his current Department of Medicine leadership role. His research interests have involved creating better patient outcomes and resource utililization for patients with Acute Coronary Syndromes (ACS) and for patients with heart failure and has published widely on a number of aspects of this care. These studies have contributed to the evidence base for many quality improvement projects that he then took forward successfully, including significant reductions in waiting times for key acute cardiology interventions and the effect of the implementation of numerous clinical guidelines on patient outcomes, that all impacted on safer and better quality care for patients. He was a Co-PI of the Chicago site of the NIH-sponsored ENRICHD trial which turned his attention to psychosocial risk factors in coronary artery disease. He acted as a steering committee member of the CRUSADE registry and was a Co-PI of the NIH-sponsored Heart Failure Adherence and Retention Trial (HART) which looked at the value of teaching self-management techniques to heart failure patients in an outpatient setting. More recently, Dr. Calvin has been involved in a clinical setting, on improving quality of care by enhancing physician behavior when prescribing therapy for patients with ACS and enhancing patient behavior by teaching self-management techniques in chronic heart failure.
Dr Calvin has published and lectured extensively about his experiences and has mentored many residents and fellows doing quality improvement projects. He has an MBA with training in Lean Six Sigma and other improvement methodologies.
