Michael Olesen

Michael is an epidemiologist by training and has over 25 years’ experience in healthcare, including roles in pathology, air ambulance, OR and CV lab, transplant, emergency management, and infection prevention. He has been on faculty for APIC to teach the advanced course for infection preventionists. He has been on staff at a number of hospitals either directly or in Allied Health roles and has served as a consultant to hospitals and businesses throughout the US. He has led a 600+ bed hospital through two successful Joint Commission inspections with no infection control findings, which was a first in the history of the hospital and merited comment from the inspectors that they were surprised that they could not find any violations for that chapter in a facility of that size. He has developed a number of policies, procedures, and protocols that have been implemented at many healthcare organizations. He has been active in many local, regional, and national committees around the country. He also serves on a federal disaster medicine team. He has been a keynote speaker at national conferences and has spoken on topics including pandemic preparedness, antibiotic resistance, emergency preparedness, and research quality and methodology. He has taught in a physician’s assistant program and has coauthored the guidelines on infection control in alternate care sites and in shelters, on the reuse of respirators, and the textbook chapter “Infectious Disease Surveillance and GIS: Applications for Emergency Management” in GIS in Hospital and Healthcare Emergency Management, and an overview course on incident management for healthcare providers for Saint Louis University. Most recently, he wrote a hypothesis linking influenza activity to Hurricane Sandy that was included in a briefing for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Currently he works with clinical and pharmaceutical teams around the world to improve and test their disaster and business continuity plans.