Steve is the Social Work Manager for Psychiatry, Primary Care, Pain Management and Infectious Disease as well as the Associate Director of the Ethics Support Service at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He completed a Fellowship in Bioethics in the Division of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, is a Clinical Instructor in the Department of Social Medicine and a Faculty Associate in the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. Steve is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Simmons College School of Social Work. He is a Social Work Consultant at the Massachusetts Medical Benevolent Society in Waltham.

He chairs the National Association of Social Work’s Massachusetts Chapter’s Committee on Ethics and Professional Review, the adjudicatory arm of NASW, and is also a member of the National Ethics Committee of NASW. He helped co-author the NASW Code of Ethics and the NASW Professional Standards.

Steve has extensive teaching experience, numerous committee assignments including the Professional Review Task Force of NASW, Harvard Medical School’s Clinical Ethics and Organizational Ethics Consortiums and Harvard Medical School’s Ethics Leadership Group. He is member of the Preventable Harm to Respect and Dignity initiative within health care at BIDMC as well as a member of BIDMC’s Emergency Management Team and the HMS Task Force on Ethical Aspects of Emergency Preparedness. He is the author/co-author of a number of articles, chapters and a book entitled Legal Issues in Social Work (2004).

Steve is an expert in Behavioral/Mental Health for the OpenNotes Program and started the first ever program in making behavioral health therapist notes readily available to patients through their personal computers in 2014. He is especially interested in how the transparency of open note writing in behavioral health can foster greater trust and partnership, improve patient engagement and contribute to de-stigmatizing mental illness and behavioral health.