Center for Healthcare Delivery Science Team

Jennifer P. Stevens is the Director of the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science at BIDMC, a pulmonary and critical care physician, and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. As a leader in healthcare delivery science, Dr. Stevens directs this hospital-wide research group that builds and studies healthcare system innovations, providing what patients need, want, and value. Her area of investigation focus includes research related to improving inpatient consultation, understanding patient outcomes associated with physician continuity, and using publicly available data to guide healthcare delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Stevens’ work has been featured in, among others, the Washington Post, NPR, and the front page of the Boston Globe. She is the co-author of Understanding Healthcare Delivery Science, a textbook published by McGraw-Hill. Dr. Stevens completed two career development awards: a K08 through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to characterize the patient effects of in-hospital specialty consultation, and a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation award to build a model for predicting underlying systemic risk in the ICU and the Emergency Department.

Bruce E. Landon is Professor of Health Care Policy and Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a primary care physician at Health Care Associates at BIDMC. Dr. Landon's primary research interest has been assessing the impact of different characteristics of physicians and health care organizations, ranging from health plans to physician group practices, on physician behavior and the provision of health care services. His work in this area has included the development of a theoretical model to explain how health care organizations affect the quality of care. Dr. Landon has been particularly interested in studying organizational approaches to improving the quality of care. A study of his found that collaboratives improved the processes of care for chronic medical conditions, but not the outcomes. He is also interested in larger organizational entities, such as managed care health plans, and has studied quality of care and patient experiences in Medicare's managed care program. In addition, Dr. Landon's research interests include payment reform, and he has been involved in studying both global payment strategies, such as Medicare's Accountable Care Organization programs, and payment systems for primary care.

Steven Horng is an emergency medicine physician, Clinical Lead for Machine Learning at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, Associate Program Director of the ACGME Multi-disciplinary Fellowship in Clinical Informatics at BIDMC, and Instructor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Horng is dual board-certified in emergency medicine and clinical informatics with degrees in computer science and biomedical informatics. He specializes in translational clinical informatics and focuses his research on novel methods of artificial intelligence to improve the quality and efficiency of clinical care. Specifically, he works on applying state-of-the-art machine learning methods to automate clinical processes and extract insight from electronic medical records.

Chloe Zera is Chief of the Maternal – Fetal Medicine Division in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at BIDMC, Clinical Lead for Equitable Care at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, and an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on understanding systems of care, reducing disparities and improving outcomes. Dr. Zera's leadership includes roles at Massachusetts ACOG, the Perinatal-Neonatal Quality Improvement Network (PNQIN) of Massachusetts, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.

Rishi K. Wadhera is a cardiologist at BIDMC, Clinical Lead for High Value Care at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research examines healthcare access, quality, and value, population health, and health policy, with a focus on cardiovascular outcomes. Dr. Wadhera’s work has explored how state and national health policy initiatives, such as value-based payment models enacted under the Affordable Care Act, affect health care delivery, outcomes, and equity. He has authored >150 peer-reviewed publications to date, including in JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ, and Annals of Internal Medicine. Dr. Wadhera also serves as Associate Program Director of the Cardiovascular Medicine Fellowship at BIDMC and Section Head of Health Policy and Equity at the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research.

Karla J. Pollick is the Administrative Director of the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, responsible for program and financial management with an emphasis on research funding and resource development. She works closely with the Center's Director to set strategic direction for and operationalize the Center's programs in support of developing the field of healthcare delivery science at BIDMC. In this capacity she is responsible for establishing the Center as an operational unit committed to training and supporting healthcare delivery scientists and the development, study and spread of healthcare delivery innovations locally, regionally and nationally. As Administrative Director, Ms. Pollick is also responsible for InSIGHT Core, a shared resource for clinical faculty and staff in need of data for research or quality improvement projects.

Catherine L. Annas is the Senior Program Manager at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, advising the Center’s Director and Administrative Director on strategic direction and programmatic focus, particularly related to the Center’s focus area of reducing disparities and promoting equity in health care delivery. Her responsibilities also include overseeing the Center’s communication strategy and supporting the oversight of academic conferences. Ms. Annas also provides project management on Center-related research initiatives. In that role, she assists investigators in their oversight and delivery of project goals, coordinates the work of project teams, and writes written reports on project outcomes. Ms. Annas also contributes to various organizational-based planning and implementation efforts.

Sara Booth is a Biostatistician I at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, assisting in statistical programming and data analysis for various research projects. Biostatisticians are involved in organizing, cleaning, merging, and manipulating large, complex datasets, including electronic health record and claims data. They work closely with investigators to determine the correct statistical testing for each analysis, assist in interpreting study results, and prepare tables and figures for presentations and manuscripts.

Ryan Gould is a Quality Research Analyst at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, supporting data management and quality control procedures for various research projects. Quality Research Analysts support investigators and program staff by conducting background research, assisting in research project design, supporting the development and updating of research protocols, and analyzing data for research studies

Stephanie Li is a Decision Support Specialist II at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science’s InSIGHT Core. Decision Support Specialists serve as expert resources on data quality providing technical, analytic and reporting services by developing customized databases which use the many and complex data repositories available based on each project’s unique needs. Decision Support Specialists work closely with researchers, project teams, clinicians and outside organizations on various research, quality improvement or operational projects conducted throughout the Center.

Melissa Manolis is the Administrative Manager at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science. The responsibilities of the Center's Administrative Manager include tracking progress and facilitating meetings for the InSIGHT Core team, which develops customized datasets to assist researchers and quality improvement teams. The Administrative Manager also provides support to the Center's Innovation Grant and Machine Learning Grant programs, creates center newsletters and manages logistics for the Center's conferences.

Ashley O'Donoghue, PhD is Economist at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She specializes in quasi-experimental designs and econometric techniques for causal inference. Healthcare economics includes working with highly granular electronic health record data to answer questions related to health care delivery and innovation evaluation and constructing mathematical models to understand complex, real-world problems.

George S. Silva is a Decision Support Specialist II at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science's InSIGHT Core, assisting researchers and quality improvement teams in the use of BIDMC's clinical data repositories. This work includes the creation of large, high-complexity cohorts as well as data extraction to support analyses for grant applications and publications. Decision Support Specialists work closely with researchers, project teams, clinicians, and outside organizations on various research, quality improvement, or operational projects conducted throughout the Center.

Bruce E. Landon is Professor of Health Care Policy and Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a primary care physician at Health Care Associates at BIDMC. Dr. Landon's primary research interest has been assessing the impact of different characteristics of physicians and health care organizations, ranging from health plans to physician group practices, on physician behavior and the provision of health care services. His work in this area has included the development of a theoretical model to explain how health care organizations affect the quality of care. Dr. Landon has been particularly interested in studying organizational approaches to improving the quality of care. A study of his found that collaboratives improved the processes of care for chronic medical conditions, but not the outcomes. He is also interested in larger organizational entities, such as managed care health plans, and has studied quality of care and patient experiences in Medicare's managed care program. In addition, Dr. Landon's research interests include payment reform, and he has been involved in studying both global payment strategies, such as Medicare's Accountable Care Organization programs, and payment systems for primary care.

Patricia Folcarelli is the Senior Vice President for Patient Care Services, the Cynthia and Robert J. Lepofsky Chief Nursing Officer at BIDMC, and a part time lecturer in Medicine at  Harvard Medical School. She previously held various roles at BIDMC for more than 30 years, including as the Vice President for Health Care Quality. In 2020, she became the Vice  President for Patient Safety at CRICO, where she focused strategic and operational patient safety solutions until she returned to BIDMC in late 2023. Dr. Folcarelli also serves as Co-Chair  of the Massachusetts Alliance for Communication and Resolution Following Medical Injury (MACRMI), as well as on the Perinatal Quality Improvement Network advisory board, the Quality and Safety Board for Mercy, a health system in St. Louis, and the Board Subcommittee for Quality and Safety Committee of Baystate Health.

Alexa Boer Kimball is President and Chief Executive Officer of Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at BIDMC, a Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Board of Trustees of Beth Israel Lahey Health. She is also President of the Beth Israel Deaconess Care Organization (BIDCO) Physician LLC, which maintains a membership of approximately 2,500 physicians. Dr. Kimball has published over 275 papers, is the author of the book 100 Questions and Answers about Psoriasis, which has been translated into Spanish, Greek, and Korean, and is the editor of Dermatologic Diseases and Cumulative Life Course Impairment. Dr. Kimball is widely recognized for her research on physician workforce economics, quality of life, and outcomes, for which she was awarded the American Skin Association Research Award for Health Policy and Medical Education and the Mass General Hospital Bowditch Prize for increasing quality of care while reducing costs. She has served on multiple non-profit Boards, including the Society for Investigative Dermatology, where she was elected Vice President; the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy; and the Hidradenitis Suppurativa Foundation. Dr. Kimball also served as President of the International Psoriasis Council.

Lawrence J. Markson is Vice President for Beth Israel Lahey Health IT Systems Services, EHR-Ambulatory and WebOMR. He is responsible for leading teams that maintain webOMR, BIDMC’s self-developed EHR; and the teams that support ambulatory care across BILH. He joined BIDMC in 1998 and held a number of positions before he was promoted to Vice President of Clinical Information Systems and Chief Medical Information Officer. He also served as interim IT leader for BIDMC for a year before assuming his current BILH position. Dr. Markson helped launch the web version of OMR, which has a long history of innovation and was one of the first systems to allow patients to view their results and later read their own notes. He also has a longstanding interest in business intelligence and led the early development of BIDMC's clinical data warehouse and performance reporting system.

Daniel Talmor is Chair of the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care, and Pain Medicine at BIDMC and the Edward Lowenstein Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School. Prior to becoming chair, he was the Vice Chair for Critical Care Medicine at BIDMC. Dr. Talmor's clinical interests focus on the prevention and treatment of ARDS as well as mechanical ventilation in the ICU. Dr. Talmor's research interests are centered on the early identification and treatment of critically ill patients, with a particular focus on the optimal delivery of mechanical ventilation. He has held multiple grants from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Institutes of Health and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Richard Whyte is the Vice Chair for Quality, Safety and Clinical Affairs in the Department of Surgery at BIDMC, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and a thoracic surgeon.  Dr. Whyte’s role as Vice Chair for Quality, Safety and Clinical Affairs spans across 14 Divisions at the Department of Surgery. He is responsible for maintaining a high standard of surgical care, analyzing significant surgical complications and safety failures, and implementing efforts to minimize the chance of those failures recurring. Dr. Whyte also serves as Chair of the Advisory Council for Cardiothoracic Surgery at the American College of Surgeons. .

Gabriel A. Brat is an Associate Surgeon in the Department of Surgery at BIDMC and an Assistant Professor of Surgery and Instructor in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Brat has a broad research focus on informatics tools to improve surgical outcomes. His interests include clinical decision support to optimize surgical opioid prescribing as well as leveraging large-scale database and machine learning models to inform surgical planning and management. He teaches a yearly health IT innovation course at Harvard Medical School and is heavily involved in digital health mentorship in the Boston doctor-entrepreneur community.

Michael N. Cocchi is an intensivist and emergency medicine physician, Associate Chief Medical Director at BIDMC, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Associate Director of the Center for Resuscitation Science at BIDMC. His research interests have primarily focused on critical care topics, in particular cardiac arrest, sepsis, and shock. He was the Principal Investigator of a Phase II clinical trial studying the effects of esmolol in septic shock, funded by the American Heart Association. A unifying theme of Dr. Cocchi's clinical, research, and administrative work is improving the delivery of safe and high quality care to critically ill patients in the pre-hospital, ED, and ICU settings, in order to achieve improved outcomes for these most vulnerable patients. 

Shoshana J. Herzig is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Associate Chief of Hospital Medicine for Academic Affairs, and Director of Hospital Medicine Research in the Division of General Medicine at BIDMC. Her research focuses on pharmacoepidemiology and medication safety in hospitalized patients. She serves as Chair of the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee at BIDMC. Dr. Herzig is also a Senior Deputy Editor at the Journal of Hospital Medicine. She has practiced clinically as a hospitalist at BIDMC for over a decade, and holds an educational leadership role as Firm Chief, through which she regularly teaches and mentors medical housestaff at BIDMC.

Steven Horng is an emergency medicine physician, Clinical Lead for Machine Learning at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, Associate Program Director of the ACGME Multi-disciplinary Fellowship in Clinical Informatics at BIDMC, and Instructor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Horng is dual board-certified in emergency medicine and clinical informatics with degrees in computer science and biomedical informatics. He specializes in translational clinical informatics and focuses his research on novel methods of artificial intelligence to improve the quality and efficiency of clinical care. Specifically, he works on applying state-of-the-art machine learning methods to automate clinical processes and extract insight from electronic medical records.

Anna C. Johansson is the Director of Social Science Research in the Division of Translational Research in the Department of Medicine at BIDMC, and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Johansson's research focus is developing and testing explanatory models of team structure and decision making using quantitative and qualitative research methods, with a specific interest to assess the degree to which the social structure, namely status hierarchies, of healthcare teams impacts diagnostic and treatment decisions, and patient outcomes. This work has focused primarily on the emergent and complex scenarios often encountered in the ICU setting and replicated in high-fidelity simulation training. Her evolving research interests now combine the theoretical and methodological research on status hierarchies with methods of EEG analysis to understand the neurocognitive basis for the processes that create hierarchies and performance outcomes. Dr. Johansson is also a Vice Chair for the BIDMC Institutional Review Board (IRB), and the Program Director for IRB Navigation and Scientific Review Program.

Ashley O'Donoghue is Economist at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, specializing in quasi-experimental designs and econometric techniques for causal inference. Healthcare economics includes working with highly granular electronic health record data to answer questions related to health care delivery and innovation evaluation and constructing mathematical models to understand complex, real-world problems.

James V. Rawson is Senior Medical Director of Diagnostic Radiology at BIDMC, Lead for Applied Engineering and Creating Value in Clinical Operations at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, and a Senior Lecturer on Radiology at Harvard Medical School. He is a health services researcher interested in the intersection of process improvement, health policy and health system redesign. Dr. Rawson served as Chair of the Department of Radiology and Imaging at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University for 17 years. During that time, he pioneered patient- and family-centered care in radiology by including patients on Radiology equipment installations and other renovation projects resulting in a patient experience designed by patients. He has used and taught process improvement and change management to improve clinical capacity, access and throughput for patient care. Dr. Rawson also served as President of the Adult Medical Staff for three years, working on hospital metrics and accreditation, and is past President of the Board of Directors of the Association of University Radiologists. He was also a member of the CMS APC Advisory Panel where he chaired the CMS Sub-committee on Packaging. Dr. Rawson also serves on the Editorial Executive Committee of the Journal of Academic Radiology.

Ammar Sarwar is an interventional radiologist at BIDMC and an Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Sarwar is a health services researcher investigating the intersection of costs and outcomes for diagnostic imaging and image-guided procedures in healthcare delivery. His current focus includes time-driven activity based costing for interventional radiology procedures, investigating access to interventional radiology services in the United States, and causes for variations in 30-day readmissions and mortality after interventional radiology procedures in the United States. He is an Associate Editor for health care policy and economics, health services research, and interventional oncology for the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology. Nationally, Dr. Sarwar serves as an advisor to the AMA's CPT editorial committee, as a member of CMS' Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee (MEDCAC), and as a member of CMS' MACRA Clinical Care Committee focusing on cost measurement.

Rishi K. Wadhera is a cardiologist at BIDMC, Clinical Lead for High Value Care at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research examines healthcare access, quality, and value, population health, and health policy, with a focus on cardiovascular outcomes. Dr. Wadhera’s work has explored how state and national health policy initiatives, such as value-based payment models enacted under the Affordable Care Act, affect health care delivery, outcomes, and equity. He has authored >150 peer-reviewed publications to date, including in JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ, and Annals of Internal Medicine. Dr. Wadhera also serves as Associate Program Director of the Cardiovascular Medicine Fellowship at BIDMC and Section Head of Health Policy and Equity at the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research.

Julius Yang is Senior Medical Director, Clinical Operation and Data Analytics of Health Care Quality for the Silverman Institute for Health Care Quality and Safety and Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs for the Department of Medicine at BIDMC. Dr. Yang works clinically as an academic hospitalist and is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has an ongoing interest in the intersection of hospital operations, healthcare quality, and medical education and has worked to develop systems to promote hospital throughput and access while enhancing both quality of care for patients and educational opportunity for physician trainees. Dr. Yang's efforts are focused on enhancing the efficacy of interdisciplinary healthcare teams (with initial focus on physician-nurse microteams) through innovative staffing models, teamwork training, and application of the Relational Coordination improvement framework enabled through grant funding from the Lowenstein Foundation.

Chloe Zera is Chief of the Division of Maternal - Fetal Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at BIDMC, Clinical Lead for Equitable Care at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science, and an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on understanding systems of care, reducing disparities and improving outcomes. Dr. Zera's leadership includes roles at Massachusetts ACOG, the Perinatal-Neonatal Quality Improvement Network (PNQIN) of Massachusetts, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.