Dr. Bates is Chief, Division of General Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Medical Director of Clinical and Quality Analysis for Partner's Healthcare Systems. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and works in the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he a practicing general internist. Trained as a clinical epidemiologist, his main interest has been the use of computer systems to improve patient care. He has done extensive work on evaluating the incidence and preventability of adverse drug events, or injuries due to drugs.
He has received a number of awards, including the first John M. Eisenberg Award for Excellent in Patient Safety Research from the National Quality Forum, the Henry Christian Award for Excellence in Research from the American Federation for Clinical Research, the Young Investigator of the Year Award from the Society for Medical Decision-Making, and the Clinical Investigator of the Year Award for the Northeast Region from the Society for General Internal Medicine.
Other leadership roles include serving as the co-Director of the Clinical Effectiveness Program, a joint program between Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health; the Principle Investigator of the Harvard Center of Excellence in Patient Safety; the editor-in-chief of JCOM--the Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management; the chair of NAPCI, the National Alliance for Primary Care Informatics, the chair of a Massachusetts task force on developing best practices for improving the response to critical laboratory results; and the chair of the Quality and Safety track for the NHII, the National Health Information Infrastructure.
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 School of Public Health in 1990.