Aurel Emerson Smith

Emerson Smith is a medical sociologist and a Clinical Research Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of South Carolina - School of Medicine. He is also a flight instructor, a search and rescue pilot, and a Texan born in Chicago. He takes a global view on hospitals, health, and healthcare innovation, including medical travel to the US.

His career began at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas and Parkland Memorial Hospital. He works with hospitals and healthcare organizations in new service development, market analysis and strategy, medical error reduction, safety improvement, and getting higher quality outcomes. He also advises on use of word of mouth marketing and other social media.

He lived in England in Devonshire with his wife, an attorney, immersed in the culture of universal health care, the National Health Service, English common law, and clotted cream.

Although based in the US, Smith continues to work abroad, with one example in Central Europe, notably Poland, to promote translational research (getting basic scientific findings from the lab to the patient's bedside) and technology transfer (commercializing technology and knowledge) in Warsaw, Wroclaw, Lodz and Krakow.

Smith has been a featured speaker for the annual 10-city US tour of the Press Ganey Regional Workshops. He is a speaker for the AHA Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development.

His presentation topics, among others, include: 1) checklists and applying the aviation model to surgery and medicine, 2) physicians as hospital employees, 3) getting positive word of mouth to promote hospitals and physicians, 4) reducing variation in patient outcomes, 5) improving outcomes while reducing costs, 6) managing and measuring word of mouth and other social media in the hospital and in the physician's office, 7) surviving prostate cancer, 8) health care from the perspective of the patient, and 9) attracting foreign paying patients to your hospital.

He received his Ph.D. from Emory University, his M.A. from Texas Christian University and his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Exeter in the UK. He is President of Metromark Healthcare Research Center with offices in Dallas, Texas and Columbia, South Carolina.