Dr. Schiff is a general internist who joined the Brigham and Women's Hospital's Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care in 2007 as a clinician researcher in the area of patient safety and medical informatics and Associate Director of the Brigham Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice. He is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He worked at Chicago's Cook County Hospital for more than 3 decades where he directed the General Medicine Clinic and Chaired the institution's Quality Assurance/Quality Improvement, and P&T (Formulary) Committees, and was Professor
of Medicine at Rush Medical College.

Currently he is the Clinical and Research Director of the AHRQ-funded Massachusetts statewide malpractice and patient safety improvement initiative—the PROMISES project (Proactive Reduction in Outpatient Malpractice: Improving Safety Efficiency and Satisfaction). He also works with CRICO Harvard Risk Management Foundation's Ambulatory Risk Management Leaders Group. Dr. Schiff was the Medical Director of the Center for Research in Therapeutics CERT TOP-MED project (Tools for Optimizing Prescribing, Monitoring and Education related to medication usage) based at University of Illinois College of Pharmacy in Chicago, and is currently a lead investigator in the Brigham and Women's Hospital AHRQ funded Health Information Technology Center for Education and Research in Therapeutics (HIT-CERT). He was awarded a grant by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) to study 100,000 CPOE-related medication errors reported to the USP MEDMARX. He is a past Chair of USP's Consumer Interest panel that oversaw the Consumer Reports drug information for patients book. He is a co-investigator in a Commonwealth Fund sponsored evaluation of an innovative primary care medical home project in Massachusetts and New York.

Dr. Schiff is the editor of a book published by Joint Commission Resources, Getting Results: Reliably Communicating and Acting on Critical Test Results. He is author of the section on Diagnostic Error in the WHO monograph Current Issues in Patient Safety: A Global Perspective prepared by The Committee on Research Priorities World Alliance for Patient Safety / World Health Organization. He is co-chair of the international Diagnostic Error in Medicine Conferences held in 2009 and 2010 in conjunction with the Society for Medical Decision-making.

He is a member of the editorial boards of Medical Care, the Journal of Public Health Policy, and BMJ Quality and Safety and author of numerous articles and book chapters on patient safety, diagnosis error, and medication quality improvement. He is past Chair of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA), recipient of the 2005 Institute of Medicine Chicago (IOMC) Patient Safety Leader of the Year award, and the Institute for Safe Medical Practices (ISMP) 2006 Lifetime Achievement award. In 2006 he was selected by Modern Healthcare as one of the “30 People for the Future”- national leaders most “likely to continue to shape health care in the years and decades ahead.”

A practicing general internist, Dr. Bates is Senior Vice President for Quality and Safety and Chief Quality Officer for both the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Physicians Organization. He mainitains his positions as 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 School of Public Health where he co-directs the Program in Clinical Effectiveness. He also serves as Medical Director of Clinical and Quality Analysis, Information Systems for 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 helped provide a blueprint for solving 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 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. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine , the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the American College of Medical Informatics, and is chairman of the Board of the American Medical Informatics Association. He serves as external program lead for research in the World Health Organization's Global Alliance for Patient Safety. 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 400 peer-reviewed papers.