John P. Keats, MD, CPE, FACOG, FACPE

Board Member

Dr. John Keats is President and Medical Director of California HealthFirst Physicians, a small multispecialty group in Ventura County, California.  It is affiliated with Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), a forty-two hospital system with facilities in California, Arizona and Nevada.  In addition, Dr. Keats is serving in several capacities at the corporate level of CHW.  He is leading a major effort to improve perinatal safety throughout the CHW system to reduce adverse perinatal events and hospital liability costs.  He created an outside peer review program using physicians on staff at CHW hospitals to review cases performed elsewhere in the system.  He leads the annual physician satisfaction assessment program for all CHW hospitals, and is working on a team to create a leadership development program for medical staff officers and hospital chief medical officers.

Before joining CHW, Dr. Keats was a physician partner in Buenaventura Medical Group for 22 years.  He served in many leadership roles in that organization, including board chair as well as ten years as the group’s medical director.  Dr. Keats’ main passion is patient safety.  He is currently chair of the California Patient Safety Action Coalition, a statewide collaboration of health care organizations of all kinds to promote Just Culture as a path to improved systems of care as well as individual accountability.  He is course director of the post-graduate course in patient safety and quality improvement for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and is an ex-officio member of ACOG’s national Committee on Patient Safety and Quality Improvement.  He is on the steering committee for ACOG’s Voluntary Review of Quality of Care (VRQC) program, and is a team leader for hospital site visits under VRQC.

Dr. Keats received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University in Providence, RI.  He completed his residency in OB/GYN at UCLA, and then served three years in the Air Force at Beale AFB in northern California.  He was in the inaugural class of the California Health Care Leadership Fellowship sponsored by the California Health Care Foundation and UC San Francisco.  He is a Certified Physician Executive and a Fellow of the American College of Physician Executives.