Hojjat Salmasian, MD, MPH, PhD

As Vice President and Chief Data and Analytics Officer (CDAO) Dr. Hojjat Salmasian leads the analytics services, data platforms and engineering, data literacy and governance, and data science teams the collective make up CHOP’s Data and Analytics (DnA) team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He also leads Artificial Intelligence strategy and governance at CHOP.

Dr. Salmasian is a primary care physician and medical informaticist by background, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at University of Pennsylvania, and an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). He received his MD from Tehran University where he also received a Master of Public Health degree. He subsequently obtained a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University. From 2015 to 2017, Dr. Salmasian was a member of the faculty at Columbia University and worked for New York-Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) as Program Director for Research Science and subsequently as the leader of the data science team. Dr. Salmasian’s success in using analytics and information technology to support Quality and Safety at NYP led to him being recruited by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in 2017, where he established their Data Science and Analytics (DSA) team. This team supported a large portfolio of projects at BWH, including COVID inpatient census predictions, optimization of ambulatory scheduling, development of data-driven solutions to improve coding and documentation, improvements to patient throughput in the operating room, and insights about the key drivers of quality outcomes. In 2021, the impact of Dr. Salmasian’s work beyond BWH and other hospitals in the Mass General Brigham system (MGB) led to his promotion to Associate Chief Medical Information Officer at BWH and his simultaneous appointment as Vice President for Operational Data Science at MGB. Dr. Salmasian joined CHOP in August 2022 as Vice President and CDAO.

Dr. Salmasian’s research focuses on healthcare quality and patient safety, and the role of health IT and artificial intelligence in measuring and improving the quality and safety of healthcare. He has been supported by multiple federal and industry grants and has coauthored more than 140 scientific publications.