A graduate of Harvard College (1951) and Harvard Medical School (1955), Dr. Mitchell T. Rabkin trained in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and began a career in academic internal medicine at that hospital after serving as chief resident in medicine in 1962.

It was a concern for the systems issues in health care that encouraged him in 1966 to accept a position of chief executive officer of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, one of the major research-intensive teaching hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

Over the next three decades under Dr. Rabkin’s leadership, Boston’s Beth Israel demonstrated that the combination of academic and technical excellence with warm and personalized care is achievable, and that the teaching hospitals of this country have a major role in the identification and resolution of systems issues in health care delivery and financing. In 1996, Beth Israel and neighboring Deaconess Hospitals merged and formed the nucleus of the second major delivery system in the area, CareGroup. Dr. Rabkin became CEO of this parent corporation until 1998 when, through a long-planned succession, he joined the Carl J. Shapiro Institute for Education and Research at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a separate not-for-profit organization he had formed with the then Dean, Dr. Daniel C. Tosteson, as a joint venture of the Medical School with Beth Israel Hospital before its merger with Deaconess Hospital. The Institute addresses teaching and research in the academic medical center, forging innovative responses to the challenges arising out of changes in the conduct of both patient care and research, changes resulting from evolving technology, the burgeoning of relevant information in those fields, and evolving economic pressures.

Dr. Rabkin is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and has Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Brandeis University, Northeastern University and several other institutions. He is past Chair of the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals, and both the Association of American Medical Colleges and its Council of Teaching Hospitals. A member of the Institute of Medicine, he has been a member of its Advisory Council. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Duke University Health System; the New York University School of Medicine Foundation Board of Trustees; the Advisory Board, Institute for Health Policy, Florence Heller School, Brandeis University; the Board of Directors, Tufts Health Care Institute; and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1999 he received the Distinguished Service Award of the American Hospital Association.