Gerald Smetana

Dr. Smetana is a general internist in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He received his medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco and completed his medical internship and residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He is an active teacher clinician with a large primary care practice and plays a central role in the teaching of medical students, medical housestaff, and senior physicians. Colleagues have repeatedly recognized Dr. Smetana as one of the Best Doctors in America in a peer survey.

He founded the medical consultation service at Beth Israel Hospital and continues to be active in the field of perioperative medicine. He is the co-author of a systematic review and guideline on preoperative pulmonary evaluation for the American College of Physicians. He has written numerous book chapters and systematic reviews in the peer-reviewed literature that provide guidance to clinicians on the value of historical features in the diagnosis of common medical conditions and on evidence based approaches to perioperative risk reduction. He is the co-editor of textbooks on perioperative medicine and evidence-based medical history taking, served as a deputy editor at JGIM, is an editor for the Beyond the Guidelines series in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and chaired a Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) task force on the research agenda for general internal medicine. He is the recipient of the SGIM national award for scholarship in medical education and is also an active member of the American College of Physicians. On behalf of the ACP, Dr. Smetana has participated in national panels charged with developing performance measures for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and for standards for perioperative care. In 2016, he was selected as a Master of the American College of Physicians (MACP).

Dr. Smetana has established a new fellowship for junior faculty in the Division of General Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess that will teach the art and science of writing systematic reviews.

Dr. Smetana speaks widely at grand rounds and continuing medical education settings and has received numerous teaching awards for these contributions. He has directed continuing medical education courses for Harvard Medical International in Switzerland, and for the CDC and Beth Israel Deaconess in Vietnam. He was a course director for Current Clinical Issues in Primary Care, a series of primary care CME conferences attended by nearly 30,000 clinicians each year. He is the co-director of the Harvard Medical School course: Prevention in Primary Care Practice; Pearls and Pitfalls.