Dr. Hanson Improving Clinical Quality and Safety Within M Health Fairview

Since the beginning of his career, Neil Hanson, MD, has been focused on quality improvement and clinical research. Now, as a director of inpatient pain he has the opportunity to put his experience and knowledge to action by improving pain services at M Health Fairview.

In October of 2021, Dr. Hanson was named Director of the Inpatient Pain Service at the M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center. With the chronic pain service separate from the regional anesthesia pain service, he’s working to integrate both services into a single service line.

“My main responsibility is to integrate the two services into one service line. It’s often difficult for providers to find the right person or set of people to help them with their inpatient pain needs. So I’ll be making it more seamless in the delivery of our services,” Dr. Hanson said.

While Dr. Hanson has been involved in quality and clinical improvement throughout his career, being named to the new position has been a great accomplishment for him.

“It’s a great honor! I enjoy how my early involvement translates to long term outcomes.”

In addition to his clinical work with the University of Minnesota Medical School and M Health Fairview, Dr. Hanson has also long been involved in academic medicine and the dissemination of new research. Since 2015, he has been involved with the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Summaries of Emerging Evidence (SEE) continuing medical education program. One of ASA’s most popular programs, SEE is an important tool for sharing emerging knowledge and advancing techniques.

“What we do is we comb through the most contemporary evidence to find interesting findings that have just been published, then we write a series of questions on them, and deliver them in a booklet to members of ASA.”

In 2020, he was promoted to medical editor which increased his contributions to SEE, including the mentoring of younger academic writers.

“I enjoy dissecting articles and this is a job in which I am already doing on a week-to-week basis anyway, so I felt like this would be a good role for me to give back to the academic community.”