David W. Baker, M.D. is a professor of medicine and chief of the division of general internal medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

Dr. Baker's research interests include improving communication between patients and health care providers, improving the quality of care for people with chronic diseases and reducing racial and ethnic health care disparities.

His current projects include examining the relationship between older adults' reading comprehension, cognitive function and mortality; improving education and self-management skills of patients with heart failure and diabetes; and using electronic health records to measure and improve health care quality.

Author of more than 100 scholarly publications, Dr. Baker has received more than $5 million to support his research. Support has been provided by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the American Heart Association and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others. He is a frequent speaker at national meetings.

Baker is a member of the Society of General Internal Medicine, the American College of Physicians and the American Heart Association. He was deputy editor of Medical Care and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Cardiac Failure and Congestive Heart Failure.

Prior to joining the Northwestern faculty in 2002, Baker taught at UCLA, Emory and Case Western Reserve.