David Bates is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is internationally renowned for his work regarding the use of health information technology to improve the safety and quality of healthcare, in particular by using Clinical Decision Support. Dr. Bates has done especially important work in the area of medication safety. He began by describing the epidemiology of harm caused by medications, first in hospitalized patients and then in other settings such as the home and nursing homes. Subsequently, he demonstrated that by implementing computerized physician order entry, medication safety could be dramatically improved in hospitals. This work led the Leapfrog Group to call CPOE one of the four changes that would most improve the safety of U.S. healthcare. It also helped hospitals to justify investing in electronic health records and in particular, CPOE. Throughout his career, Bates has published over 600 peer reviewed articles and is the most cited researcher in the fields of both patient safety and biomedical informatics, with an h-index of 115. In a 2013 analysis published by the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, he ranked among the top 400 living biomedical researchers of any type. He is currently Editor of the Journal of Patient Safety. Currently, Dr. Bates serves as the Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Medical Director of for Information Systems at Partners HealthCare. In addition, he is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He served as Chief Quality Officer and Senior Vice President of Brigham and Women's from 2011 to 2014. He was appointed Chief Innovation Officer in October 2014 to 2016, and he directs the there. In addition, he serves as the director of the AHRQ funded and the Patient Centered Learning Lab at the Brigham Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice.
Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, American Medical Informatics Association, 2016
John P. Glaser Health Informatics Innovator Award, October 30, 2017
Advisory activities
Dr. Bates has served as the chair of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act workgroup and the board chair of the Board of the American Medical Informatics Association. He served as the external program lead for research in the World Health Organization's Alliance for Patient Safety from 2006-2015 and was a member of the U.S.'s HIT Policy Committee through 2016. In addition, Bates was the president of the .
Selected publications
Bates, D. W., Cullen, D. J., Laird, N., Petersen, L. A., Small, S. D., Servi, D.,... & Edmondson, A.. Jama, 274, 29-34.
Leape, L. L., Bates, D. W., Cullen, D. J., Cooper, J., Demonaco, H. J., Gallivan, T.,... & Edmondson, A.. Jama, 274, 35-43.
Bates, D. W., Leape, L. L., Cullen, D. J., Laird, N., Petersen, L. A., Teich, J. M.,... & Seger, D. L.. Jama, 280, 1311-1316.
Kaushal, R., Bates, D. W., Landrigan, C., McKenna, K. J., Clapp, M. D., Federico, F., & Goldmann, D. A.. Jama, 285, 2114-2120.
Bates, D. W., Kuperman, G. J., Wang, S., Gandhi, T., Kittler, A., Volk, L.,... & Middleton, B.. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 10, 523-530.
