About
Dr. Wiper is a native of Ohio and attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine where he double majored in Economics and German Literature. He taught middle school after college and decided he needed to do something a lot easier, so he went to medical school. After Case Western University medical school, he completed four years of OBGYN residency at University Hospitals of Cleveland and then three years at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation during a fellowship in Gynecologic Oncology. He spent 10 years at Maine Medical Center as a busy clinician, OBGYN Residency Program Director and Division Director. He came to Greenville in 2009 as Chairman of OBGYN and Medical Director of Women’s Health. He also served as Chief Clinical Officer for patient experience. He’s also a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine-Greenville. In 2018 he transitioned to system Vice President, Culture, Experience and Organizational Science. It is this last role that Dr. Wiper was charged with developing an inaugural health systems science infrastructure. Fortunately, great pre-existing relationships existed with Prisma Health and Clemson and there was a formal intent to forge discovery partnerships with clinicians and Clemson faculty. Dr. Wiper has partnered with Clemson’s Dr. Marissa Shuffler from Industrial and Organizational Psychology to conduct numerous projects looking at leadership, multiteam systems, burnout, and clinical care pathways in gynecologic oncology. Their work involves numerous post-doctoral candidates, graduate students and undergrads and affords them many opportunities to work in the clinical environments. This work has recently been supported by a $6M grant from the Army Research Institute to study multiteam systems and next generation teams.
How their research is transforming health care
U.S. health care is under tremendous strain and pressure to change. We have amazing training programs, healthcare systems, hospitals and research and development infrastructure that is the envy of the world. Yet, careful analysis shows we lack efficiency and high reliability as evidenced by high cost, variable access, and quality metrics that at times are great and other times need improvement. Dr. Wiper and his team believe the science of multiteam systems is a powerful and apropos tool to apply to the complex ecosystem of healthcare. They also believe burnout in healthcare is a crisis nationwide—data shows COVID makes it even worse—and multifactorial efforts need to be made to understand more broadly the causes of burnout and how to mitigate it across all healthcare domains.News and media related to Dr. Pace's Research Clemson University Newsstand - Clemson researchers, Prisma Health clinicians work to reduce burnout, enhance the practice of medicine.
Health research keywords
Multiteam System Science, MTS, burnout, leadership, teamwork
