2021-22 Linde Fellows
Meet Our 2021-22 Fellows
Jessamyn Blau, MD
Regional Director, CHA Broadway Care Center
Dr. Blau is an internal medicine physician at Cambridge Health Alliance and the medical director of the Broadway Care Center in Somerville. She additionally currently serves as the medical director for COVID outpatient care at CHA. As care needs have dramatically shifted during the course of the COVID pandemic, by necessity so has the way in which care is provided. As part of a Primary Care transformation strategy developed for the post-COVID era, Dr. Blau is working with CHA Primary Care leadership to develop and implement a regionalization model of the twelve primary care clinics at CHA, focusing principally on iterating best practices within one of the three regions, which includes the Broadway Care Center.
The goal of this strategy is to better use and share resources across the CHA system while acknowledging the unique constraints on in-person visits in the context of the COVID pandemic. For her Linde project, Dr. Blau will specifically focus on developing and evaluating scheduling and triage strategies that best address patient needs and preferences in this new model, helping patients to choose the type of care — telemedicine or in person, continuity or not — that is most appropriate for each particular care episode, and to integrate this model into the operational and clinical structures of the region.
Dr. Blau graduated from Yale University with a BA in Political Science and subsequently completed master's degrees at Sciences-Po Paris and at Columbia University. She attended the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and completed her Internal Medicine residency at the University of Washington. She worked as a hospitalist at Northwest Hospital in Seattle before joining CHA in 2018.
Gretchen Dietrich, MD
Medical Director, Beth Israel Lahey Health Primary Care in Arlington, North Billerica, and Wilmington
Dr. Gretchen Dietrich is the Medical Director of the Beth Israel Lahey Health Primary Care practices in Arlington, North Billerica and Wilmington. She received a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tufts University and then worked for 8 years at Teradyne, Inc. writing software and managing software engineers in the Wireless Group.
She graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine and the Boston University Family Medicine Residency. Initially practicing in a small family medicine practice in Somerville, she has been seeing patients at the BILH practice in Arlington since 2017. She has been the medical director of the Arlington, North Billerica and Wilmington practices since 2019.
Dr. Dietrich's goal is to improve the rate at which PCPs achieve their individual ACO quality goals by working with the Epic team to provide data that is both more timely and accurate and also with legacy Lahey providers on best practices for using the improved data. She will pilot this at her three practices before rolling it out to other primary care practices.
Andrew Nichols, MD
Medical Director, Mount Auburn Healthcare Lexington
Dr. Nichols is a primary care physician and medical director of Beth Israel Lahey Primary Care at 57 Bedford Street in Lexington. Dr. Nichols' training in internal medicine was at Boston Medical Center where he was hired out of residency and became founding physician and medical director of Commonwealth Medical Group on the Boston University main campus. He subsequently moved to Mount Auburn Hospital, where he also assumed the role of medical director of his present practice. He has been actively involved in MACIPA (Mount Auburn IPA) and has been a physician champion for EMR implementations, most recently an Epic implementation at Mount Auburn Hospital.
Dr. Nichols' Linde project will evaluate present office practice workflows and EMR use with an eye toward optimizing physician productivity, while cutting down physician burnout, and increasing the overall quality of care delivered. This will involve a baseline assessment of present practices, and then data analysis to seek out correlates between office workflows, the use of the medical record, and resulting physician productivity and satisfaction. The ultimate goal will be to identify best practices in office workflow/EMR utilization to disseminate amongst the larger provider community.
Tina R. Waugh, MD
Department Chair, Family Medicine, Beverly Hospital Practice Medical Director, Lahey Health Primary Care
Dr. Tina Waugh is a 1997 graduate of Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Waugh completed her residency at the Beverly Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program, and has been on staff at Beverly Hospital ever since. She began her career in private practice where she worked for 13 years, serving as president of the corporation for most of this time. In 2013 she transitioned her practice to the Beverly Hospital owned Northeast Medical Practices, now Lahey Health Primary Care. Dr. Waugh currently serves as Department Chair of Family Medicine at Beverly Hospital, and Medical Director of her primary care practice.
She serves on several committees in the Northeast PHO, as Medical director of her Tufts Medicare Preferred group, and has served on many hospital committees through the years. Dr. Waugh has been an active advocate for advanced care planning, leading a multi-disciplinary task force at Beverly Hospital to improve end of life care, and subsequently serving on the Lahey Advanced Care Planning steering committee. She was the 2010 recipient of the Phillip Herrick Award at Northeast Health System, which is awarded to a staff physician who exemplifies leadership, outstanding medical care, and community service.
Recognizing that data shows that including more women at the upper levels of leadership improves a company's performance, and employees at women-led companies demonstrate stronger belief in the strategy set by senior leadership, Dr. Waugh's Linde project seeks to improve the experience of female providers at BILH. She hopes to improve the organization's ability to recruit and retain talented female physicians, and encourage women to seek leadership roles within the organization.