Lynn Sweeney, MD

Lynn Sweeney, MD, is an attending physician at Rhode Island and The Miriam hospitals and an assistant professor of clinical emergency medicine at The Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University. She graduated suma cum laude with bachelors of science in her double majors of marketing and print journalism from Syracuse University. After ten years working in sales, she returned to school and earned her medical degree from Brown University.

During her residency at Rhode Island Hospital, Dr. Sweeney developed a special interest in the way medical staff communicated with their patients. She led a venture called Refining the Patient Experience, a customer service training initiative designed to improve the patient experience in the emergency department. In 2009, she received funding to co-lead Project CLEAR (Communication Leading to Excellence and Ameliorating Risk), a quality improvement program that utilizes simulation-enhanced training to teach both crew resource management and patient service to multidisciplinary medicine teams throughout Lifespan. The program has received both local and national recognition for the novelty of its approach. Fundamentally, health professionals are taught an algorithmic approach for optimizing the patient encounter.

An instructor in adult simulation at the Lifespan Medical Simulation Center, Sweeney sees a growing role for simulation as a tool in educating her fellow providers particularly in the topic of effective staff communication to enhance the quality and efficiency of bedside care. On the horizon, she hopes to develop a curriculum aimed at simulation-based training for managers in the art of having courageous conversations that coach team members in a manner that enables each staff member to develop to their full potential as a medical provider.