Larry Nathanson, M.D.

Larry A. Nathanson, M.D. is a board certified emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, Mass., and is the director of Emergency Medical Informatics for the Department of Emergency Medicine. Besides his clinical responsibilities in the emergency department, he develops computer applications that support emergency care as part of the Caregroup Clinical systems team.

He received a bachelor's degree in Computer Medical Science from Boston University and has been programming computers for more than 20 years. Dr. Nathanson received his medical degree from the State University of New York in Brooklyn and trained in the specialty of Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He completed an NIH-sponsored Medical Informatics fellowship at the Center for Clinical Computing, BIDMC. Dr. Nathanson also currently holds a faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Nathanson is the primary architect and programmer of The Emergency Department Dashboard, an electronic patient-tracking system used at BIDMC. The Dashboard software integrates data from the emergency department and other areas of the hospital, giving clinicians the ability to better monitor the department, improve patient safety, and streamline the delivery of emergency care. This technology and its positive effects have been featured on CNN and in Newsweek, as well as other national publications.

Dr. Nathanson and two other physicians also developed a Web-based tutorial program for medical students, house officers and clinical staff called ECG Wave-Maven. This ever-expanding self-assessment program draws from the over 400,000 ECG waveforms already stored on the hospital’s computer system and will encompass virtually all of the major diagnostic challenges faced in the bedside interpretation of ECGs.

Dr. Nathanson has been published widely on the subject of computer informatics in the emergency department setting. He has also been part of a teaching team at Harvard Graduate Design School on Emergency Department Design of the Future.