Dr. Robert Dittus, M.D.

Robert Dittus (BSIE 1973), MD, MPH is the Albert and Bernard Werthan Professor of Medicine, Associate Vice Chancellor for Public Health and Health Care, Senior Associate Dean for Population Health Sciences, and Director of the Institute for Medicine and Public Health at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center (GRECC), Senior Quality Scholar and Director of the Quality Scholars Program at the VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare System. He has served previously as Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Public Health at Vanderbilt and Director of Clinical Practice and Health Policy Analysis at the Regenstrief Institute at Indiana University. Dr. Dittus has combined training in industrial engineering, medicine and epidemiology to advance healthcare quality improvement, outcomes of care and overall individual and population health through his research on the effectiveness, efficiency, timeliness, safety and equity of health care. He has advanced the methodology of medical decision-making and conducted numerous studies delineating the comparative effectiveness of alternative strategies for clinical care. He has conducted numerous studies examining the microsystems of health care that have improved health care delivery and on the macrosystems of health care that have led to improvements in health policy. Over the past ten years, he has served as senior investigator to guide the discovery of critical illness associated delirium and long-term cognitive impairment and development of new treatment paradigms with global impact on reducing the mortality, morbidity and costs of critical care. He is currently principal investigator of a large CMS Innovation Project to improve health care delivery and population health through care coordination. He has led or been co-investigator of over $300 million in research and training funding and authored over 200 publications. Dr. Dittus has served as PI of fourteen federally funded fellowship training grants in clinical research and was the principal investigator of Vanderbilt’s NIH funded K30 award. He has trained over 100 fellows and junior faculty of whom over 90% remain in academic medicine. He has served as the President of the Association for Clinical Research Training and received the 2013 Distinguished Educator Award from the Association for Clinical and Translational Science. Dr. Dittus serves on numerous professional academic, community and health care Boards of Directors. He was a Teaching and Research Scholar of the American College of Physicians, named the Harvey Branscomb Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University, and has been given the Outstanding Industrial Engineer Award and the Distinguished Engineering Award from Purdue University, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Indiana University, the Duncan Neuhauser Award for Curricular Innovation from the Academy for Healthcare Improvement, and the Innovation with Distinction Award in Research Training and Education from the AAMC. He served as the founding President of the Academy for Healthcare Improvement and is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians. Education: MPH., Epidemiology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; MD, Medicine, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; BSIE, Purdue University