He previously served as an intensive care physician and director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

[4] According to surgeon Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, Pronovost's "work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.

[1] Pronovost's book Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor's Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out was released in February 2010.

[5] In his Ph.D. thesis, he documented that in intensive-care units in Maryland, an intensive care specialist on the staff reduced death rates by a third.

[16] Also in 2013, Pronovost advocated for a system of alcohol and drug testing for doctors in a Journal of the American Medical Association article.

In October 2018, he joined University Hospitals as Chief Quality and Clinical Transformation Officer, adding value across the entire health system.

His wife, Marlene Miller, is Chair of Pediatrics as well as Pediatrician-in-Chief at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center.