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Opportunities to Engineer the Future of Health Care

Speaker
David Berger, Professor of Surgery, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center
Date
Location
L2D2
Biography

Dr. David H. Berger serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Baylor St. Luke's Medicine Medical Center. He was previously the operative care line executive at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center. He was recently elected president of the Association of VA Surgeons and is past-president of the Association for Academic Surgery. He is well known for his success in implementing process and quality improvements at the DeBakey VA Medical Center.

Dr. Berger has an active research program in surgical outcomes and health services research. He is a member of iQuEST (Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety), the VA Health Services Research & Development Center of Excellence. Dr. Berger’s current work involves improving the patient discharge process in an attempt to reduce avoidable hospital readmissions. As part of this research, Dr. Berger is working on using mobile technology to communicate with patients in the postop period.

Another project is in collaboration with Dr. Panos Kougias. This project is studying the use of a scheduling algorithm that takes into account patient and surgeon factors to better predict operative time.

Dr. Berger mentors research residents. He is currently the secondary mentor for Aaron Scott, and previously he was the primary mentor for Courtney Balentine, Celia Robinson, and Linda Li. These research residents have published more than 40 manuscripts and have won several national honors. All research residents have also been fellows of the Health Services Research & Development Center of Excellence.