Executive Sponsors

David W. Bates, MD, MSc, Senior Vice President for Quality and Safety, Chief Quality Officer, Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization

David W. Bates, MD, MSc, is Senior Vice President for Quality and Safety and Chief Quality Officer for both BWH and the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization, a position he assumed July 1, 2011.

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

In addition to serving as a practicing general internist and chief of General Internal Medicine, Bates also is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a 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 for Partners Healthcare. He directs the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and serves as external program lead for research in the World Health Organization’s Global Alliance for Patient Safety. He is the associate editor of the Journal of Patient Safety.

At a time when patient safety has become a key driver for focusing national attention on health care quality, Bates’ work has not only shown the magnitude of the problem, he has 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, and has performed many studies on how computerized, evidence-based guidelines can improve quality and efficiency.

Bates is a graduate of Stanford University, and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He began his fellowship general internal medicine at BWH in 1988, and he received an MSc in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1990.

Barbara Bierer, MD, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Senior Vice President, Research, Director, Center for Faculty Development & Diversity, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Barbara E. Bierer, M.D. is Senior Vice President for Research at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bierer, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, completed her internal medicine residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and her hematology and medical oncology training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Dr. Bierer maintained a research laboratory in the Department of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and was appointed Director of Pediatric Stem Cell Transplantation at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital in 1993. In 1997, she was named Chief of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Biology at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, where she received the Director’s Award in 1999. She returned to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in July 2002, as Vice President of Patient Safety and Director of the Center for Patient Safety. In 2003, Dr. Bierer moved to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital to assume her current position.

In 2006, Dr. Bierer established the Center for Faculty Development and Diversity at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and now serves as its first director. For these efforts, she was the first recipient of the HMS Harold Amos Faculty Diversity Award in 2008. In addition, Dr. Bierer is the Co-Chair of the Partners HealthCare Committee on Conflict of Interest and the Program Director of the Regulatory Domain of the Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Award. Dr. Bierer maintained until recently a research laboratory focusing on the biochemistry of T cell activation and immunosuppression. She has authored or co-authored over 150 publications and is on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Current Protocols of Immunology.

In addition to her academic responsibilities, Dr. Bierer was elected to the Board of Directors of the Association for Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP), serving as its President from 2003-2007 and was on the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). She was a member of the Medical and Scientific Advisory Board and, later, the Board of Directors of ViaCell, Inc. She is currently a member of the AAMC-AAU Advisory Committee on Financial Conflicts of Interest in Clinical Research, on the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Science, Technology and the Law, and on the Secretary’s Advisory Committee for Human Research Protections, Department of Health and Human Services, for which she serves as chair. Dr. Bierer lives with her husband, Steven Hyman, and their three children.