Assistant Physician Medicine-General Internal Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

Assistant Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

Physician Investigator (Cl) Laboratory of Computer Science, Mass General Research Institute

MD University of Texas Medical School-Houston 1997

clinical informatics; disease management; education distance; electronic mail; healthcare quality improvement; hospital communication systems; medical informatics; medical informatics applications; medical records systems computerized; quality improvement; reminder systems Dr. Lester is a primary care internist and a member of MGH's Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) and Harvard Medical School Faculty. After completing his training in internal medicine at MGH, Bill joined the faculty at MGH and Harvard Medical School where he provides clinical care, supervises trainees, and conducts clinical informatics research and service activities to enhance the quality of patient care.

Bill's work towards improving the effectiveness of clinical information systems has roots grounded in his:
• clinical experience in internal medicine,
• expertise in engineering system design, and
• his formal training in medical informatics.

Bill has over 15 years of practical experience in building real-world clinical informatics systems. His informatics work has employed novel approaches to care, combining both non-visit based- and population-based quality improvement interventions.

With his MGH colleagues, Bill spearheaded a project to modernize MGH’s Organ Transplantation Electronic Medical Record System as part of the MGH Transplant Quality and Performance Improvement Project. This project employed a graft-based transplant population database tightly linked with the clinical record through sophisticated transplant workflow support for enhanced inpatient and outpatient care. This system also provided administration and staff with detailed clinical outcomes dashboards with customizable data views.

Dr. Lester's research work over the last decade has ranged from quality improvement projects to novel methods to increase patient activation. As a practicing physician, Dr Lester's clinical experience informs his perspective of what needs to be improved in clinical information systems; his informatics work helps him to find ways to improve these very systems and affect change.