David Baker, M.D., M.P.H., FACP is the Executive Vice President for Health Care Quality Evaluation at The Joint Commission in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois. A member of the senior management team, he heads the Division of Health Care Quality Evaluation, which subsumes The Joint Commission’s activities associated with the development, testing and implementation of evidence-based standards, survey methods, national patient safety goals, and performance measures across all of The Joint Commission’s various accreditation and certification programs. Dr. Baker has administrative responsibility for The Joint Commission Departments of Quality Measurement, Health Services Research, and Standards and Survey Methods.

Before assuming his current position, Dr. Baker served since 2002 as Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, and Deputy Director, Institute for Public Health and Medicine at that school. In this capacity, he oversaw the largest division of the Department of Medicine, including clinical practices, residents’ continuity of care clinics, and research programs. He established the hospital medicine program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which eventually became the first fully independent Division of Hospital Medicine in a major academic medical center. He also created and directed Northwestern’s first practice-based research network, including affiliated community primary care practices and federally-qualified health centers. In addition, Dr. Baker has maintained his own very active research portfolio and has been a major contributor to the ongoing national quality measurement discourse. He chairs the American College of Physician’s Performance Measurement Committee and serves as its representative to the Measures Application Partnership Coordinating Committee. He has also served as a member of the Measure Implementation and Evaluation Committee of the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement.

Prior to joining Northwestern, Dr. Baker held the position of Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology-Biostatistics at Metro-Health Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. In that role, he developed a very successful health services research program, including studies of health literacy, health outcomes for the uninsured, and evaluation of Northeast Ohio’s hospital report card program. He also led Metro-Health’s heart failure disease management program. Earlier, he worked at the Grady Memorial Hospital, was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center at the UCLA School of Medicine while working at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Dr. Baker received a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California and a Doctor of Medicine from the UCLA School of Medicine. He also has a Master’s Degree in Public Health from the UCLA School of Public Health. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, having completed a residency in internal medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and a research fellowship with the RWJ Clinical Scholars Program at UCLA. He has served on numerous professional Boards and Committees, including NIH study sections, has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, and is a frequent speaker at a wide variety of research and policy meetings.