Sonali Desai, MD, MPH, serves as the vice president of quality and associate chief medical officer for the Department of Quality and Safety at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In this position, Desai oversees the Brigham’s Department of Quality and Safety, leading the hospital’s critical role in delivering high-quality, safe and compassionate care to patients and families.
A practicing rheumatologist and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Desai has worked at the Brigham for 16 years and within the Department of Quality and Safety for over a decade. During this time, Desai has led a variety of novel and innovative safety programs using artificial intelligence and electronic medical records that have been scaled across the hospital and Mass General Brigham as a whole. She has also spearheaded department-wide quality programs on preventive care, chronic disease management, high-risk readmissions in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure, opioid use, and health equity. Additionally, she has created an infrastructure for ambulatory patient safety and a portfolio of initiatives that have advanced safety reporting and culture.
As a researcher, Desai focuses on evidence-based interventions for improving the quality of care and patient safety, with a focus on ambulatory care, and has published more than 40 peer-reviewed publications. In 2019, she received the Donabedian Award in Quality & Safety from the American Public Health Association for Ambulatory Safety Nets and Diagnostic Error Reduction. She has also taught internationally in quality and safety, and was a founding program director at Harvard Medical School for the Safety, Quality Informatics and Leadership program.
Desai attended both college and medical school at Brown University and obtained her master’s in public health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She completed her internal medicine residency and chief residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and her rheumatology fellowship at the Brigham.
