*Both Dr. Allen Kachalia and his wife Dr. Tisamaria Sherry will be joining the Department of Medicine
We are pleased to share that Allen Kachalia, M.D., J.D., will join Johns Hopkins Medicine as the new senior vice president of patient safety and quality and director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. Dr. Kachalia will assume these positions Dec. 1, and we look forward to the quality and safety experience he will bring from his nearly 20-year career in medicine.
Dr. Kachalia comes to us from Brigham Health in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is the chief quality officer and vice president for quality and safety.
Brigham Health includes an 800-bed academic medical center, a 160-bed community hospital and a 1,600-member physician organization. At Brigham Health, he helped establish a board quality committee that regularly reports on quality performance. He also built a provider-based electronic mortality review system that other health care systems are modeling, and he led several initiatives to further ambulatory safety and transparency in medicine.
Prior to his appointment as chief quality officer in 2014, Dr. Kachalia served as associate medical director for Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization and associate chief quality officer for Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He remains clinically active as an academic hospitalist, teaching students and residents on medical wards.
At Harvard Medical School, Dr. Kachalia is site director of the Harvard Medical School Fellowship in Patient Safety and Quality at Brigham Health and an associate professor in the Department of Medicine. He also holds an academic appointment as associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he teaches an annual course on law and clinical medicine.
In his role at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Dr. Kachalia will bring a mix of academic and operational experience while working to end preventable harm, improving patient outcomes and patient experience, and eliminating 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 will be instrumental in his new position.
A native of Southern California, Kachalia is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles; Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and University of Pennsylvania Law School. He completed an internal medicine residency and a year as chief resident at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Kachalia will relocate to Baltimore, Maryland, in the coming weeks with his wife, Tisamarie Sherry, M.D., Ph.D., who will join Johns Hopkins as a faculty member in the Division of General Internal Medicine.
We thank the search committee, chaired by Robert Kasdin — senior vice president, chief operating officer and chief financial officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine — and co-chaired by Jonathan Efron, senior vice president of the Office of Johns Hopkins Physicians, for their dedication to finding the best candidate for this position.
We hope you will join us in congratulating and welcoming Allen and Tisamarie as they prepare to join our team later this year.
-Paul B. Rothman and Kevin W. Sowers
