Dr. Desai leads a systemwide quality and patient safety strategy at Boston Medical Center Health System, the largest essential hospital in New England, serving one of the most diverse urban patient populations in the country. She oversees all six domains of quality for safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient-centered care. She is also responsible for driving progress toward key institutional benchmarks, including achieving a CMS 4-star rating and sustaining Leapfrog “A” grades. Prior to joining Boston Medical Center, she spent nearly two decades at Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she rose to vice president of quality and associate chief medical officer and pioneered the integration of AI-enabled workflows in the EHR to proactively identify and mitigate patient risk. These innovations were later scaled across the broader Mass General Brigham system. Dr. Desai is the founding program director of Harvard Medical School’s safety, quality, informatics and leadership program, and has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications on quality and patient safety. She was recognized with the “Donabedian Award in Quality and Safety” from the American Public Health Association and serves as deputy editor for the International Journal for Quality in Health Care.
