About the Department of Medicine
Our Mission
The Department of Medicine has three missions: to provide outstanding clinical care, to educate the next generation of physicians, and to improve lives through biomedical research.
Clinical Care
Our leadership is focused on one important mission: to provide the kind of care that we would want for our own family members and loved ones. We provide services from primary care to leading-edge specialty services through our divisions of medicine. In addition to caring for patients at BIDMC in Boston, many of our doctors deliver care at our partners and affiliates across Massachusetts.
Our quality improvement programs help us provide timely, safe, and effective care across Medicine and have helped make BIDMC one of the safest hospitals in the country.
Outpatient Visits at BIDMC Boston in 2019
Medical Education
We are proud to provide superb teaching to Harvard medical students, residents, fellows and current faculty. Our educational programs are led by a team of nationally-known faculty. The Department is renowned throughout Harvard Medical School for its teaching, and our members have garnered more teaching awards in recent years than any other department in the school.
Research
Our research programs are focused on finding new ways to cure disease and improve lives. In 2017, the Department earned research funding of nearly $175 million, placing it among the best-funded medical school departments of medicine in the country. Our research faculty has received the highest national honors. They are members and fellows of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Our History
BIDMC has a rich and unique history. The Deaconess Hospital was founded by a group of women called deaconesses, who worked full-time for Methodist churches. In 1896, these women built a 15-bed hospital next to the home in which they lived to provide care to the underserved. Beth Israel Hospital opened as a Jewish community hospital in Roxbury in 1917 for Jewish physicians and patients, both of whom were discriminated against at other hospitals. The two hospitals merged in 1996, creating Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a new combined Department of Medicine. We’re proud to carry on the traditions of our founding hospitals in providing high quality and compassionate care to all.