David Frank, MD, PhD

Medical Director for Patient Safety, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

David Frank, MD, PhD is the Medical Director for Patient Safety at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Frank oversees all patient level safety and quality issues, infection control, and patient complaints concerning the quality of care. He also oversees the continual monitoring of the professional practice of all physicians, nurse practitioners (NPs), and physician assistants (PAs). In addition, Dr. Frank chairs the Institute’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, and spearheads efforts in optimizing medication safety. In all of these roles, he not only helps lead the response to safety events that occur, but he also helps analyze “near misses” and conducts proactive risk assessments to develop systems-level solutions to prevent errors before they can occur.

Dr. Frank, who attended Stuyvesant High School in New York, received his undergraduate degree at MIT, and his MD and PhD from Yale. He was subsequently an intern, resident, and chief resident in internal medicine at Yale, after which he trained in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In addition to his safety roles, Dr. Frank directly cares for patients with hematologic malignancies, runs a laboratory developing novel targeted signal transduction inhibitors, and teaches at Harvard Medical School.