Chief Sponsoring Institutions and Clinical Learning Environments Officer

Dr. Weiss is the Chief Sponsoring Institutions and Clinical Learning Environments Officer. He oversees Sponsoring Institutions and the Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) program. Dr. Weiss is also the co-chair of the CLER Evaluation Committee.

Dr. Weiss came to the ACGME from the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), where from 2007 to 2012 he served as president and CEO. During his tenure at the ABMS, he initiated the Enhanced Public Trust Initiative, which broadened public membership and involvement in governance and policy development; developed and implemented the new Ethics and Professionalism Committee and a Health and Public Policy Program; and established alignment with both Maintenance of Licensure, and public and private programs focused on physician accountability, such as the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Physician Quality Reporting Initiative. Other key initiatives included public reporting of Maintenance of Certification and Board Eligibility. Through Dr. Weiss’ leadership, ABMS-International was established, with its first international collaboration with Singapore.

Dr. Weiss has devoted his medical career to issues of health care quality, equity and access to care, and training physicians and other health care providers in health care improvement. Since the 1990s, he has been leading collaborative quality improvement efforts that seek to both improve health care and train physicians and other health care providers in methods of quality improvement and patient safety. In 2005, Dr. Weiss established the first US graduate-level Master’s program in patient safety and healthcare quality at Northwestern University. In 2009, this program was enhanced towards faculty development in this field, and beginning in 2012, this program was the first in the US to offer a doctoral-level program leading to a PhD in healthcare quality and patient safety.

Dr. Weiss has conducted US and international epidemiological and health services research projects related to guideline implementation, chronic care management, outcomes measurement, quality improvement, and health care equity. With over 200 published articles, reviews, books, book chapters, and monographs, Dr. Weiss is internationally recognized as a leader in health care quality, patient safety, and health care equity. He helped found the Chicago Patient Safety Forum and served as its first chair. Dr. Weiss has served on the National Committee for Quality Assurance’s Clinical Performance Measures Committee, the Executive Committee of the American Medical Association’s Physicians Consortium for Performance Improvement, the National Quality Forum’s Consensus Standards Approval Committee, and the AQA Alliance’s Performance Measures Committee.

Dr. Weiss is a Member of the American College of Physicians (ACP) Board of Regents. Over the years, he has chaired the ACP’s Clinical Assessment Subcommittee for Clinical Guidelines, and helped establish and then chair the Performance Measurement Committee. Dr. Weiss is on the Board of the Education Council for Foreign Medical Graduates, and has served on Institute of Medicine committees, including those that developed the reports Crossing the Quality Chasm and Identifying Priority Areas for Quality Improvement.

Dr. Weiss began his academic career as assistant professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar. Dr. Weiss served as a special assistant to the program director for the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, developing its epidemiology program and initiating its national studies of inner-city asthma. From there, he served as associate professor of internal medicine at Rush Medical College and director of the Center for Health Services Research at the Rush Primary Care Institute, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Weiss joined the faculty of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine as professor of medicine, where he founded the Institute for Healthcare Studies. He also served as director of the Center for Management of Complex Chronic Care at Hines and Chicago Veterans Administration Medical Centers.

Dr. Weiss received his medical degree from the University of Health Sciences/Chicago Medical School and completed clinical training in internal medicine at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. He earned a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Illinois School of Public Health and a Master’s in health services administration from Harvard University School of Public Health. He did his post-doctoral training fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Dr. Weiss is board certified in internal medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine. He also maintains a role as professor of clinical medicine in the Division of General Medicine and in the Institute for Healthcare Studies in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.