Letter from the Chairman
Mark L Zeidel, MD
Chairman, Department of Medicine
Physician-in-Chief, Herrman L. Blumgart Professor of Medicine
On behalf of the faculty and the staff of the Department of Medicine of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, welcome to our website. In these pages you will see profiled a leading Department with a distinguished history, outstanding current clinical and research productivity and a brilliant future as embodied in our trainees.
The Department of Medicine at BIDMC is among the nation's elite departments, devoted to outstanding clinical care, committed to the education of students, residents, and fellows, and dedicated to discovery in the biomedical sciences.
Our clinical care is motivated always by a single goal: To provide the kind of care to every patient, at all times, that each of us would want our family members to receive. To achieve these clinical results, we have developed an extremely comprehensive set of quality and safety initiatives, which span the entire universe of clinical care, and which integrate seamlessly with major efforts within the hospital as a whole.
Our investigators perform cutting edge research at the forefront of discovery. Of course we have a large and diverse grant portfolio, but more importantly, our people do research that truly moves their respective fields forward.
Led by an outstanding team of nationally prominent educators, we provide superb teaching to Harvard medical students, highly innovative and effective residency and fellowship training programs, and terrific CME courses.
The Department has 383 full-time faculty members. Among the faculty are 1 member of the National Academy of Sciences, 5 members of the Institute of Medicine, 13 members of the Association of American Physicians and 25 members of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
In fiscal year 2006, the Department had externally funded research of over $147 million, placing it among the ten best funded Medical School Departments of Medicine in the country – though we are a single hospital, not a medical school -- and last year the Department generated more than $43 million from fee-for-service clinical activities.
We have a substantial primary care base which generated over 247,000 outpatient visits last year; a diverse patient population, with ties to community clinics that provide care to the underserved throughout Boston; and numerous clinical programs that lead the way in Boston – these include 21,000 endoscopy sessions, among them the most advanced of cutting-edge endoscopy procedures; over 4,500 cardiac catheterizations and peripheral interventions; and the most intensive care beds of any Boston hospital.
The training ranks of the Department of Medicine include 158 residents and 137 fellows. The Department is renowned throughout Harvard Medical School for its teaching, and our faculty has garnered more teaching awards in recent years than any other Department in the school. We are proud to be part of a hospital that uniquely values education and is the home of the Shapiro Institute for Medical Education as well as the first fully accredited hospital-based simulation center.
We hope that this website will answer your questions about the Department and its programs. Please contact us if we can provide additional information about our department; we would also be grateful for any suggestions you may have about the website itself.
