From 1988 to 1990, Dr. Bates did a fellowship in general internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. He received his M.Sc. from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1990. Bates has served as the chair of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) workgroup and the board chair of the Board of the American Medical Informatics Association. He served as the external program lead for research in the World Health Organization's Alliance for Patient Safety from 2006-2015 and was a member of the U.S.'s HIT Policy Committee through 2016. In addition, Bates was the president of the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua).