David Rutherford DO

David Rutherford, DO, is an emergency physician and the National Quality Director for Emergency Medicine. Prior to his current role, Dr. Rutherford most recently served as both the Regional Quality Director, Central Mountain Division, and System Quality Director for the USACS Intermountain Health sites. In these roles, Dr. Rutherford provided oversight and direction for quality, risk, safety, and education initiatives for 30 USACS sites in both Colorado and Kansas and serves on the National Quality Improvement Committee (QIC) which aims to orchestrate regional and national projects related to improving clinical care. Dr. Rutherford also served on the Executive/Operations Committee for the USACS Colorado West region where he helped guide day-to-day operations in several areas.

Dr. Rutherford served as a member of the USACS National Clinical Quality and Patient Safety Committee (CQPS) and Advisory Board where he provided insight for the development of several Clinical Management Tools (CMTs) and helped to develop and refine the clinical on-boarding process. Notably, he developed and implemented a regional CMT which incorporates the use of a high-sensitivity troponin assay to risk stratify patients for acute coronary syndrome in the emergency medicine specialty. 

In addition to practicing emergency medicine at a range of sites in the Denver-metro area and in the surrounding mountains, he also volunteers as the Lutheran Medical Center physician proxy to facilitate medical decision making alongside the ethics committee for critically ill patients who lack capacity to make their own medical decisions and have no surrogate decision maker. 

Dr. Rutherford earned his bachelor’s degree from Ohio University and his medical degree from Western University of Health Sciences. He completed his residency at Doctors Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, where he served as Chief Resident.