Senior Vice President, Patient Safety and Quality

Allen Kachalia, M.D., J.D., is the senior vice president of patient safety and quality for Johns Hopkins Medicine and director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.

With nearly 20 years in medicine, Dr. Kachalia has focused on eliminating preventable harm, improving patient outcomes and patient experience, and curbing waste in health care delivery. His research background in legal issues in medicine and how they relate to the quality and safety of patient care contributes to these overarching goals. He also practices as an academic hospitalist with medical students and residents.

Dr. Kachalia was formerly the chief quality officer and vice president for quality and safety at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he oversaw inpatient and ambulatory quality and safety initiatives. He was also a general internist, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an associate professor of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research has focused on how the law affects medical care, particularly how liability system reform and the disclosure of medical error relate to the quality and safety of health care.   

A native of Southern California, Dr. Kachalia is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles; Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He completed an internal medicine residency and a year as chief resident at the University of Michigan.

He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Tisamarie Sherry, M.D., Ph.D.