Richard Platt

Dr. Platt is the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute Distinguished Professor 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. 

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 chaired the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management advisory committee, the NIH Epidemiology and Disease Control study section, and co-chaired the CDC Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Infectious Diseases. 

He was the founding Principal Investigator of the FDA Sentinel Program, a CDC Prevention Epicenter, a CDC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics, an AHRQ Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics, and the coordinating center for the AHRQ Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network. He co-leads the coordinating center of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory and leads its Distributed Research Network.  

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.