Richard is a physician and former Professor in Business Administration at the Harvard Business School in the Technology and Operations (TOM) unit. He teaches a second year course on health care operations management, “Managing Medicine,” which discusses the design, management and improvement of the processes by which patients are medically treated. He co-directs the MD-MBA program and teaches a course at Harvard Medical School on medical management.

His research has focused on health care operations strategy, technology adoption in health care, patient safety, clinical process management and clinical quality improvement. Central to his teaching and research is the principle that health care delivery requires different types of process, each of which must be managed in a different way. Professor Bohmer has written on learning, technology adoption and health care operations strategy in the medical and management literature and published numerous cases on health care operations management. In 2004 he was a member of the Institute of Medicine committee that produced the report “Saving Women’s Lives: Strategies for Improving Breast Cancer Detection and Diagnosis.”

Before joining the HBS faculty, Dr. Bohmer was a Senior Clinical Associate at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Clinical Director of Quality Improvement for four years, where he was responsible for planning and implementing the clinical quality improvement program at the hospital.
Dr. Bohmer was born in Wellington, New Zealand. He trained at the Auckland University School of Medicine in Family Medicine, and has practiced medicine in New Zealand, England and Africa. He attended the Harvard School of Public Health on a Fulbright Scholarship from where he graduated in 1993 with a Masters of Public Health in Health Care Management. He has taught and consulted on health management issues in numerous locations both in the US and internationally.