Asaf Bitton
About Asaf Bitton
Asaf Bitton MD, MPH is an Associate Physician and Instructor in Medicine at the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His main interests are in primary care innovation, as well as the prevention and control of chronic non-communicable diseases in the developing world. A main focus of his current work is primary care system redesign within the United States. To that end, he is helping to design, transform, and evaluate primary care clinics toward the patient-centered medical home model, a new mode of primary care provision that is being rapidly disseminated in the US. In the past he has worked in the Samoan Islands conducting research on the underlying causes of the diabetes and obesity epidemic in the Pacific, as well as ways to utilize community health workers to improve diabetes care in American Samoa. He has also been involved in tobacco control since 2000, formerly serving as a temporary technical advisor to the WHO on tobacco document research in Europe, and researching methods used by the tobacco industry to combat global tobacco control policy measures. He is currently working on documenting and measuring the impact of tobacco control policies in South Africa and on promoting the provision of tobacco treatment services in low resource settings across the developing world. He has a particular interest in the intersection between tobacco and TB treatment in low resource settings. He practices primary care medicine and is the Assistant Medical Director at the Brigham and Women’s Advanced Primary Care Associates, South Huntington, a new medical home practice in Jamaica Plain, MA. In addition, he teaches and mentors students in health policy courses at Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and internal medicine residents at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Asaf graduated from Brown University with a degree in Health and Society, the University of California San Francisco Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed his internal medicine training, chief residency, and general medicine fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Role(s) / Profession(s)
- Academic
- Physician
Organization
- Brigham And Women's Hospital - BWH
- Global Health Delivery Project
Work Location(s)
- United States
Language(s)
- English
Recent Contributions
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Asaf Bitton started a discussion "BMJ Study on Tobacco and TB". in the TB Infection Control community.
Please pardon the cross-posting - I just wanted to make you aware of this study that came out in BMJ this week. It is available as an open access paper free of charge: http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5506.full Bottom line: our model suggests that smoking has a huge effect on TB mortality (40 million ...
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Asaf Bitton started a discussion "BMJ Study on Tobacco and TB". in the MDR-TB Treatment & Prevention community.
I wanted to let you all know about this study (of which I am an author) that came out in BMJ this week. It is available as an open access paper free of charge: http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5506.full Bottom line: our model suggests that smoking has a huge effect on TB mortality (40 ...
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Asaf Bitton replied to "TB/ MDR TRAINING COURSES BY WHO or OTHERS," in the MDR-TB Treatment & Prevention community.
Is there any interest in teaching a short module on brief tobacco cessation in the training programs? Given the important role that tobacco use plays in increasing the risk of death and decreasing the rate of TB treatment completion, it would be great to be able to incorporate cessation counseling ...
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Asaf Bitton started a discussion "Incorporating Tobacco Cessation into TB services". in the MDR-TB Treatment & Prevention community.
There is an emerging consensus around the evidence that tobacco use increases a person's risk of having a positive tuberculin skin test, developing active TB, and of dying from TB by a factor of 1.5-3. In India and South Africa as many as 20-40% of TB deaths may also be ...
Recent Recommendations
- None at this time.