Daniel Sands, MD, MPH

After undergraduate and medical training at Brown and Ohio State Universities, Dr. Sands moved to Boston to pursue housestaff and informatics training, first at Boston University and then at Beth Israel Hospital. Currently on the faculty of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Sands has also served as Director of the Douglas Porter Fellowship in Clinical Computing, as Clinical Informatics Advisor to the Electronic Patient Record Project at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, as Medical Director of Beth Israelís Clinical Workstation Initiative, as Director of Electronic Patient Records in the Center for Clinical Computing, and as Clinical Director of Electronic Patient Records and Communication. Dr. Sands is one of the principal architects of the primary care component of the hospital-wide computing system at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. This system is now used in lieu of the traditional paper record by the majority of primary care physicians. He has designed and implemented programs that perform calculations required by clinical formulas, and these resources are consulted by clinicians more than 600 times per week, both for clinical and educational uses. Dr. Sands has been among the leading advocates of the use of electronic mail in patient care. His publication with Dr. Beverley Kane is widely recognized as the definitive set of recommendations for using electronic mail wisely and well in medical practice. More recently, Dr. Sands has turned his efforts to improving communication between physicians and patients by means of a patient-oriented Web siteó PatientSiteóthat offers patients access to their electronic medical records and a means whereby they can readily communicate with their physicians. This program is widely recognized for its excellence in patient-centered communication. A natural leader and excellent communicator, Dr. Sands is a regular contributor to informatics meetings as well as to influential educational programs.