He was appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1987 as assistant professor of medicine and also served at the RAND Corporation from 1989 to 1992 as a senior natural scientist.
[2] Beers led a team from Harvard University that studied 850 residents of Boston-area nursing homes, looking at the medications they were prescribed and their case histories.
In a review in The New York Times, Jane Brody said the book "could well be the most useful of all" of the plethora of medical guides aimed at the general public.
Both of his legs were amputated in the 1990s, after which he served as a volunteer counselor for amputees at Philadelphia's Magee Rehabilitation Hospital.
He died at age 54 on February 28, 2009, in Miami Beach, Florida, due to complications of diabetes and was survived by his husband, Stephen K. Urice, as well as by his mother and a sister.