Dr. Charles Safran, Division Chief

Charles Safran is a primary care internist who has devoted his professional career to improving patient care through the creative use of informatics. He is Chief of the Division of Clinical Computing, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. He is a senior scientist at the National Center for Public Health Informatics at Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He is the immediate past President and Chairman of American Medical Informatics Association was previously Vice-President of the International Medical Informatics Association. He is an elected fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics and the American College of Physicians.

Dr. Safran is co-Editor of the International Journal of Medical Informatics and on the Health on the Net (HON) Foundation Council. He is a member to the Consumer Empowerment workgroup of the American Health Information Community formed by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. During his career he has helped develop and deploy large institutional integrated clinical computing systems, ambulatory electronic health records, clinical decision support systems to help clinicians treat patients with HIV/AIDS and most recently personal care support systems for parents with premature infants which he calls collaborative healthware.

He founded a company, Clinician Support Technology and as its CEO successfully brought his ideas to a national market. The company's products and technology were acquired by a major public company. He has over 150 peer-reviewed publications and speaks to national and international audiences. He has recently testified for the U.S. Congress on Health IT. He graduated cum laude in Mathematics and hold a Masters degree in mathematical logic and a Doctor of Medicine all from Tufts University.

Division Chief Interviewed on Podcast Division Chief Dr Charles Safran was interviewed on the HIMSS Physician Community Podcast Series titled Episode #39: Clinical Informatics Certification. Dr. Safran discusses the recent addition of Clinical Informatics as a sub-specialty of the American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM). You can listen to the podcast by clicking here. Division Faculty credited in TED Talk Division Chief Dr Charles Safran and Division Faculty and co-founder Dr Warner Slack were highlighted for being at the forefront of patient empowerment. Drs. Safran and Slack were credited during a TED Talk by "e-Patient Dave". See the Ted Talk here. Health Care Industry Moves Slowly Onto the Internet By Steve Lohr on April 05, 2009 The health care industry, a well-known laggard in information technology, is where most of corporate America was a decade or more ago in adopting Internet-style computing. There are innovators, intriguing experiments and lots of interest, but the technology hasn't yet gone mainstream. <More...> Stopping Epidemics Before They Start By Jessie Scanlon on April 05, 2009 In late March, thanks to a random safety check by Kraft Foods, and calls to the Food and Drug Administration from two ill people, health officials learned of salmonella-contaminated pistachios, and were able to alert the public. No one died from the tainted nuts, but that isn't always the case. The salmonella-contaminated peanuts detected in September 2008 have caused at least nine deaths, and in general, 5,000 people die every year in the US... <More...>