Allen Kachalia, M.D., J.D., will become the senior vice president of patient safety and quality for Johns Hopkins Medicine and director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, effective Dec. 1.

During his nearly 20-year career in medicine, Kachalia has

Allen Kachalia, M.D., J.D., will become the senior vice president of patient safety and quality for Johns Hopkins Medicine and director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, effective Dec. 1. Credit: Brigham and Women’s Hospital

served in a variety of key roles, including leadership positions. Currently he is chief quality officer and vice president for quality and safety at Brigham Health in Boston, which includes an 800-bed academic medical center, a 160-bed community hospital and a 1,600-member physician organization. As a member of the hospital’s senior leadership team, Kachalia provides oversight for inpatient and ambulatory quality, safety, patient experience, risk management, clinical compliance and biomedical engineering. In this role, Kachalia built a provider-based electronic mortality review system that other health care 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.

In a note to staff, Paul B. Rothman, M.D., dean of the medical faculty and CEO, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Kevin W. Sowers, president of the Johns Hopkins Health System and executive vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine, welcomed Kachalia and cited his experience, leadership and expertise. They said Kachalia’s “research background in legal issues in medicine and how they relate to the quality and safety of patient care will be instrumental in his new position.”

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 health care and academic medical centers today,” Kachalia says. “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.”

Kachalia first joined Brigham Health in 2003, and was promoted to associate medical director of Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization in 2004. He became associate chief quality officer for Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2011, before being promoted to chief quality officer and vice president for quality and safety in 2014. Kachalia joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 2003, where he currently is an associate professor of medicine. He is also an associate professor of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Kachalia is passionate about research on legal issues in medicine, including malpractice system reform and disclosure of medical error, and how these issues relate to the quality and safety of medical care.

Kachalia received a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry and business economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He earned his medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and he completed an internal medicine residency, including serving one year as chief resident, at the University of Michigan. He also holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

A native of California, Kachalia has spent his career in Boston. He and his wife, Tisamarie Sherry, M.D., Ph.D., plan to relocate to Baltimore, where they already have family, within the coming weeks. Sherry will join the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine faculty in the Division of General Internal Medicine.