• Edit
• Help

Luke Sato, MD

Chief Medical Officer and Vice President
Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions

Dr. Sato is the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and Vice President of Loss Prevention and Patient Safety for the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions (RMF) and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). His current responsibilities include overseeing development of all Patient Safety and Loss Prevention programs for RMF and coordination of these initiatives across the Harvard Medical System. Dr Sato is clinically trained in neurology and also received training in medical informatics through Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Division of Health Sciences and Technology. This is a joint post-doctoral fellowship program sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. Through his background, he has applied industry principles and best practices to clinical risk management. He has developed several methodologies to analyze medical malpractice claims and patient safety data. One approach attempts to help the healthcare system analyze data through the eyes of the patient by identifying care process failures and systems-based issues that could be otherwise blind sighted by the healthcare system. This methodology is called Patient-Centered Risk Management and is now the basis of how RMF analyzes data.

Dr. Sato is currently assessing the feasibility of using attributes from malpractice claims data to identify relationships between claims attributes that were previously unknown and embedded within malpractice data using decision analysis and statistical regression models. Our thesis is if these data mining and analytic methods show promise and value with malpractice data, it could be scaled toward other data sources including adverse events, patient complaints/satisfaction and other patient safety data currently captured in healthcare organizations. The extension of this method would be applied to update and generate new taxonomies, ontologies, and coding structures at RMF based on newly identified relationships between data attributes. From a practical point of view, the value proposition of this project is to identify systems and process-based issues that would lead to risk, safety, and quality interventions cutting across department and organizational silo structures. This methodology would also be used to update and refine RMF’s taxonomy and coding structures. Dr. Sato is also currently involved in a National Science Foundation study to compare static taxonomies to dynamic analytic methods of extracting actionable information from patient safety and malpractice claims data.

Prior to becoming CMO, Dr. Sato was the Chief Information Officer for RMF where he oversaw all system application development that enables RMF to currently capture, manage and manipulate information pertaining to malpractice claims, adverse events and near miss data. Dr. Sato was appointed staff at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and in a medical informatics research and development laboratory at BWH and Harvard Medical School before taking the position at RMF.