Eric Alper, MD

VP/Chief Quality Officer and Chief Clinical Informatics Officer, UMass Memorial Health Care

Eric Alper, MD is VP/Chief Quality Officer and Chief Clinical Informatics Officer at UMass Memorial Health Care in Worcester, MA. After Brown, he attended medical school and did his residency in Internal medicine at UMass in Worcester. He became the first Hospitalist and built the hospitalist program which now employs over 60 physicians. He led the education of medical students on their 3rd year Medicine clerkship for 10 years. After the release of the IOM report To Err is Human, he began work on patient safety and quality; he became Patient Safety Officer for UMass Memorial Health Care and worked on safety / quality improvement in that role for 3 years. Recognizing the need to improve systems to improve quality, he spent the next decade working in the Healthcare IT space. He worked for a year with UpToDate on building evidence based, standard order sets. He then returned to UMass, participated in the implementation of Siemens Soarian. With the conclusion of that project, he transitioned to Lifespan hospitals in Providence, RI to lead the implementation of Epic for 1300 physicians and 13000 employees. Subsequently, when UMass Memorial announced that it was going to implement Epic, he returned there and helped lead the implementation for its 2200 physicians and 14,000 employees. He had driven the formation of an effective governance structure for effective decision-making. His teams have developed hundreds of evidence-based order-sets and alerts, effective inpatient, ambulatory and other workflows. He has led the rollout of a number of other initiatives like e-prescribing of controlled substances, improvements in opioid prescribing, exchange of information with Epic and non-Epic EHRs, patient engagement, and many other initiatives. In 2018, he was appointed Chief Quality Officer, where he is leveraging Epic to improve patient care, patient experience, and quality of care. He has expertise in usability design, decision support, interoperability, quality measurement, end user adoption, and quality improvement methodology.