Co-Founders
Tom Delbanco is the John F. Keane & Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Until 2002, he was Chief of the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a unit he created and led for more than 30 years. Educated at Harvard College and the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, Tom led the establishment of one of the first primary care practice and teaching programs at an academic health center. Subsequently, he created the Harvard Medical School Faculty Development and Fellowship Program that has now trained more than 250 general internists for academic careers.
Tom served in the Congress as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow in 1978-9 and is one of the founders of the Society of General Internal Medicine, serving also as its President in 1986. He was the founding Chair of the Picker Institutes in the USA and Europe, organizations that document patient experiences with care and work with patients to improve health services. A practicing internist until 2011, Tom is the author of numerous scholarly papers, has co-edited three books, and is senior editor of the monthly case study series, “Clinical Crossroads,” published in JAMA.
In 1998, Tom was named a Master of the American College of Physicians, and in 2003, he received the Robert J. Glaser Award, the highest honor awarded by the Society of General Internal Medicine. In 2007, Harvard Medical School gave him the William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award.
Jan Walker is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the research faculty in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Her primary research interests are in patients’ perspective on care, the use of information technologies to improve their experience, and strategies to reorganize and improve primary care practice.
Jan formerly served as Vice President for Client Services and Research at the Picker Institute, an organization devoted to measuring patient experiences and incorporating the patient perspective into care. She was the founding Executive Director of the Center for Information Technology Leadership at Partners HealthCare, and also directed national program evaluation for the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. Educated at the University of Kansas (BSN) and Boston University (MBA), she has a clinical background in nursing. Her publications have focused on patient perspectives on hospital care, interoperability among critical elements of the health system, and patient insights into new electronic technologies.
