Sonali Desai, MD, MPH, serves as the vice president of quality and associate chief medical officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In this role, Dr. Desai leads the hospital’s quality program, supporting the delivery of high-quality, safe and compassionate care to patients and families.
A practicing rheumatologist and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Desai has worked at the Brigham for 18 years and within the Department of Quality and Safety for over a decade.
Dr. Desai has led a variety of novel and innovative safety programs using artificial intelligence and electronic medical records that have been scaled across the hospital, our Mass General Brigham system and the Greater Boston region. She has also spearheaded department-wide quality programs on preventive care, chronic disease management, high-risk readmissions in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure, opioid use, and health equity. Additionally, she has created an infrastructure for ambulatory patient safety and a portfolio of initiatives that have advanced safety reporting and culture.
Dr. Desai conducts research on improving the quality of care and patient safety, with a focus on the ambulatory setting, and has published more than 40 peer-reviewed publications. In 2019, she received the Donabedian Award in Quality & Safety from the American Public Health Association for Ambulatory Safety Nets and Diagnostic Error Reduction. She has also taught internationally in quality and safety, and was a founding program director at Harvard Medical School for the Safety, Quality Informatics and Leadership program.
Dr. Desai is a native of Massachusetts and attended both college and medical school at Brown University in Rhode Island. She obtained her master’s in public health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She completed her internal medicine residency and chief residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and her rheumatology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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