Luke Sato is the Vice President of Loss Prevention and Patient Safety and Chief Information Officer for the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions (RMF) and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. RMF is a charitable, medical, and educational membership organization incorporated by the Harvard Medical Institutions in 1979 to provide medical malpractice claims management and services related to patient safety, risk management, loss prevention, quality improvement, underwriting, and related research for the Harvard Medical Institutions. RMF is the administrative organization managing the Harvard Medical Malpractice Insurance Program also known CRICO (Controlled Risk Insurance Company).

His current responsibilities include overseeing development of all systems applications as well as Patient Safety and Loss Prevention programs for RMF. These systems applications and services enable RMF to capture information pertaining to malpractice claims, adverse events and near miss data. Further, these tools allow RMF to investigate and analyze the data for its evidence-based Patient Safety and Risk Management initiatives for the Harvard Medical Institutions.

Dr. Sato is clinically trained in neurology. After completing his residency, he received post-doctoral training in Medical Informatics through the National Library of Medicine – sponsored fellowship training program through the Division of Health Science and Technology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After his fellowship, Dr. Sato joined the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and held the position of Associate Director of the Decision Systems Group (DSG), a medical informatics research and development laboratory at BWH and Harvard Medical School before taking the position at RMF.

During his tenure at the DSG, Dr. Sato developed educational and training multimedia applications for physicians, nursing staff, and hospital employees of the Partners HealthCare System, the parent organization founded by Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General Hospitals. One such application focused on management and communication strategies for caring at the end of life. Other projects Dr. Sato oversaw included the first implementation and deployment of the Partners HealthCare System Intranet/Internet site in the early to mid 90s, which is an institution-based authoring/editing/maintenance tool that allows each department to maintain their specific content information without having any knowledge of HTML coding.