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Douglas S. Bell is a general internist and health services researcher whose work focuses on the design and evaluation of health information technology (HIT).

Dr. Bell completed his MD at Harvard Medical School in 1990, a medical informatics fellowship at Harvard and MIT in 1994, a residency in internal medicine at Stanford in 1996, and a PhD in Health Services at UCLA in 2000. He is now an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and an Associate Natural Scientist at RAND. Dr. Bell has conducted pioneering research in online physician education, online survey data collection, and the digital divide among health care providers.

His awards include First Prize in the American Medical Informatics Association's 1994 Student Paper Competition, and in 2002 he was named a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Faculty Physician Scholar. Dr. Bell recently completed a 3-year RAND study that developed expert-consensus recommendations for electronic prescribing and assessed the extent to which these recommendations are being implemented among a sample of commercially-available electronic prescribing systems. (See rand.org/health/eRx/)

Dr. Bell currently leads an ongoing study of physicians' learning and retention from diabetes guidelines, using online educational tools developed in his laboratory.