Allen Kachalia, M.D., J.D., the chief quality officer and vice president for quality and safety at Brigham Health in Boston, will become the director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and the senior vice president of patient safety and quality for Johns Hopkins Medicine.
At Brigham Health, Kachalia provides oversight for inpatient and ambulatory quality, safety, patient experience, risk management, clinical compliance and biomedical engineering. In this role, he built a provider-based electronic mortality review system that other healthcare systems are modeling, and has led several initiatives to further ambulatory safety and transparency in medicine. He has also helped establish a board quality committee that regularly reports on and drives quality performance. Kachalia is a general internist and is clinically active as an academic hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
As senior vice president, Kachalia will oversee patient safety and quality initiatives across Johns Hopkins Medicine aimed at ending preventable harm, improving clinical outcomes and patient experience, and reducing waste in health care delivery. As the director of the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, Kachalia will direct academic and scholarly efforts of the institute, which was formed thanks to a $10 million gift from C. Michael Armstrong — former chairman of the Johns Hopkins Medicine board of trustees — as an infrastructure to lead, coordinate and support Johns Hopkins’ patient safety and quality efforts.
“I am thrilled to take on these new roles, which come with many important responsibilities addressing some of the biggest challenges facing healthcare and academic medical centers today,” Kachalia said in a prepared statement. “I look forward to bringing a fusion of my academic and operational experience to help advance John Hopkins Medicine’s goals to deliver the best patient care possible to all.”
