Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice

| David W. Bates, MD, MSC


Dr. Bates is an internationally renowned expert in patient safety, using information technology to improve clinical decision-making, quality-of-care, cost-effectiveness, and outcomes assessment in medical practice.

A practicing general internist, Dr. Bates is Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, where he co-directs the Program in Clinical Effectiveness. He also serves as Medical Director of Clinical Quality and IS Analysis, Information Systems at Partners HealthCare System.

At a time when patient safety has become a key driver for focusing national attention on health-care quality, Dr. Bates' work has not only shown the magnitude of the problem but also provided a blueprint for helping solve it. He led a seminal study on the epidemiology of drug-related injuries, demonstrating that the most effective way to prevent serious medication errors is to focus on improving the systems. He has also performed many studies on how computerized, evidence-based guidelines can improve quality and efficiency. Dr. Bates has been recognized for several years by Modern Healthcare magazine as one of the “100 most powerful” individuals in U.S. health care.

Dr. Bates is a graduate of Stanford University and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He began his fellowship in general internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in 1988, and he received an M.Sc. in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in 1990. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2005, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the American College of Medical Informatics. He serves as external program lead for research in the World Health Organization's Global Alliance for Patient Safety. Dr. Bates is the past president of the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua). He is the Editor of the Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management, and the Associate Editor of the Journal of Patient Safety.

Dr. Bates' special research interests include clinical decision-making and affecting physician-decision-making, particularly using computerized interventions; quality of care and cost-effectiveness and medical practice; and outcome assessment. He has published on medication errors and injuries due to drugs, and the use of information systems to improve medication safety and the use of ancillary tests, as well as on predictors of bacteremia and evaluation of patients with suspected sepsis. He has published over 700 peer-reviewed papers and has an h-index of 115, which ranks him among the 400 most cited biomedical researchers of any type.



 

 

 

 

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