Gerald Smetana MD

Dr. Gerald William Smetana is a general internist in the Division of General Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a Professor of Medicine, Emeritus at Harvard Medical School. He received his college degree in biochemistry at UCLA and his medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco, where he graduated Alpha Omega Alpha. He then completed his medical internship and residency at Beth Israel Hospital (now known as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) in Boston.

He was one of the first clinician educators to join the faculty in the Division of General Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess after completing his residency, and has remained in this role ever since. For 38 years, he was an active teacher-clinician with a large academic primary care internal medicine practice and played 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 Deaconess 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 (ACP). He has written numerous book chapters and systematic reviews in the peer-reviewed literature that guide clinicians on the value of historical features in the diagnosis of common medical conditions and on evidence-based approaches to perioperative risk reduction. Dr. Smetana has published a total of approximately 200 articles, chapters, and online monographs. His peer-reviewed works have since been cited by authors of more than 7000 subsequent publications.

He is the co-editor of textbooks on perioperative medicine and evidence-based medical history taking, served as a deputy editor at JGIM, was an editor for the Beyond the Guidelines series in the Annals of Internal Medicine for 10 years, and chaired a Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) task force on the research agenda for general internal medicine. His textbook on Evidence-Based History Taking in the McGraw-Hill Lange series remains widely read by medical students in training and is required reading for Introduction to Clinical Medicine courses at many medical schools.

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. He has been selected as a Master of the American College of Physicians (MACP), an honor reserved for members who have demonstrated “integrity, impact in practice or in medical research, or other attainments in science or in the art of medicine.”

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 was the co-director of the Harvard Medical School course: Prevention in Primary Care Practice; Pearls and Pitfalls, for 12 years.