Faculty Directory

Richard Platt

Professor

Dr. Platt is a Professor in the Department of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School. He served as Chair of the Department and President of the Institute until 2024. Dr. Platt leads a 100-person Therapeutics Research and Infectious Diseases Epidemiology group within the Department.

He has extensive experience in developing systems and capabilities for using routinely collected electronic health information to support public health surveillance, medical product safety assessments, comparative effectiveness and outcomes research, and quality improvement programs. Dr. Platt also has experience in performing health system based intervention studies and observational studies using electronic medical record and claims data. 

He was Principal Investigator of the FDA sponsored Sentinel Program for 13 years and is now its co-Investigator; Sentinel performs post-marketing safety surveillance using the electronic health data from over 125 million people.  He co-leads the coordinating center of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory and leads its Distributed Research Network.  He is co-principal investigator of a CDC Prevention Epicenter. Dr. Platt has been Principal investigator of a CDC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics, and an AHRQ Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics. 

He is a member of the National Institute of Medicine’s Leadership Consortium on Value and Science Driven Healthcare and co-chairs its Evidence Mobilization Action Committee.

Publications

Developing a PRogram to Educate and Sensitize Caregivers to Reduce the Inappropriate Prescription Burden in the Elderly with Alzheimer's Disease (D-PRESCRIBE-AD): Trial protocol and rationale of an open-label pragmatic, prospective randomized controlled t (Pubmed Abstract)

Nasal Iodophor Antiseptic vs Nasal Mupirocin Antibiotic in the Setting of Chlorhexidine Bathing to Prevent Infections in Adult ICUs: A Randomized Clinical Trial. (Pubmed Abstract)

In the Media