Sachin Kheterpal, M.D., M.B.A., Recipient of the 2024 Award for Excellence in Research

It is my great pleasure to congratulate Dr. Sachin Kheterpal, recipient of the 2024 American Society of Anesthesiologists Award for Excellence in Research. Dr. Kheterpal is likely known to readers through his transformative leadership of the Multicenter Perioperative Outcomes Group (MPOG). Dr. Kheterpal has helped to usher in a new era in clinical anesthesiology research by first establishing rigorous electronic health record observational research best practices and then growing MPOG to more than 70 hospitals, 26 million patients, and 58 billion data points. MPOG also has an evidence-based quality improvement arm that engages more than 8,000 anesthesia clinicians nationwide each month and provides maintenance of certification education approved by the American Board of Anesthesiology (Raleigh, North Carolina). Finally, and most recently, MPOG has become a platform for pragmatic multicenter clinical trials across the United States, as evidenced by the $30 million grant from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute that was led by Dr. Kheterpal, in collaboration with multiple MPOG centers. Overall, he is the principal investigator or coprincipal investigator of more than $75 million in sponsored research contracts during just the last 10 yr. Importantly, he has mentored an impressive cadre of junior faculty who are now funded by the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Maryland) through K and R mechanisms for outcomes research. One of Dr. Kheterpal’s most important contributions to the field of anesthesiology research is not the MPOG data resource, per se, but the collaborative network of investigators and egalitarian approach to data and scientific innovation. It is important to remember that when MPOG was forming in 2008, the field had struggled to replicate the research success of networks such as the Multicenter Study of Perioperative Ischemia (McSPI), the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP), and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (Chicago, Illinois) Adult Cardiac Surgery Database (STS-ACSD). As Dr. Kheterpal reached out to potential MPOG collaborators, he established specific data science innovations that are now being replicated by other specialty networks: (1) the data coordinating center would not claim “ownership” over the centralized dataset; (2) the coordinating center did not have preferential access to the centralized dataset; (3) all contributing centers, regardless of how many patients’ data they contributed to the initiative, had equal access to the centralized dataset: (4) any member center was free to “leave” the collaborative at any point, and their data contribution from the centralized dataset would be deleted; and (5) all data access requests required a prespecified methodology and statistical analysis plan that was reviewed by the Perioperative Clinical Research Committee, composed of one voting representative from each active MPOG site. These innovations, which decentralized data access authority, encourage both multicenter scientific contribution beyond data submission and prespecified hypothesis testing, and serve as an exemplar not only for anesthesiology, but other specialties as well. Dr. Kheterpal is internationally renowned for his informatics, data science, and observational research expertise. He serves as an editor for our flagship journal, Anesthesiology; was a trustee of the International Anesthesia Research Society (San Francisco, California); and is an elected member of the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research Academy of Research Mentors (San Francisco, California). Outside the bounds of our specialty, he has served as a member of the highly prestigious National Institutes of Health Council of Councils and the Novel and Exceptional Technology Research Advisory Committee (NExTRAC), reporting directly to the National Institutes of Health director. He served on President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group, establishing the National Institutes of Health All of Us research program. Institutionally, he is a Professor and Associate Chair of Anesthesiology, as well as (the inaugural) Associate Dean for Research Information Technology at the University of Michigan Medical School (Ann Arbor, Michigan). He also cofounded/co-led the university-wide Precision Health Initiative, which has been highly successful because of his vision and collaborative spirit across multiple schools and colleges. I cannot think of a colleague in anesthesiology more deserving of the American Society of Anesthesiologists Award for Excellence in Research than Dr. Sachin Kheterpal. Importantly, in recognition of his enormous contributions to multiple fields, Dr. Kheterpal was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (Washington, D.C.) in 2022, an honor that has been bestowed on only several dozen anesthesiologists in the more than 50-yr history of the organization. This is yet another testimony to his world-class stature. As a founder of a software company acquired by General Electric (Boston, Massachusetts), former General Electric international management leader, exceptional transplant anesthesiologist, brilliant researcher, dynamic teacher, dedicated mentor, and major innovator, Dr. Kheterpal has every reason to boast. Despite this, he is one of the kindest, humblest, giving colleagues with whom I have ever worked. His remarkable personal qualities create an open, honest, and dynamic research ecosystem for a wide range of trainees and colleagues that contributes to their success as much as his professional excellence and dedication. I congratulate him again on this remarkable and well-deserved accomplishment. Competing Interests The author declares no competing interests.