Dana Gelb Safran, ScD

Biography

Dana Gelb Safran is Senior Vice President for Performance Measurement and Improvement at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA). In this role, she leads the company’s initiatives to measure and improve healthcare quality, safety and outcomes. Dr. Safran also retains an active academic practice and is Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Prior to joining BCBSMA, she was Director of The Health Institute at Tufts Medical Center.

Dr. Safran was among the lead developers of the BCBSMA Alternative Quality Contract (AQC), a provider contract model launched in 2009 with the twin goals of improving quality and outcomes while significantly slowing spending growth. The AQC includes robust performance incentives based on a broad set of validated clinical quality, outcome and patient experience measures. The model’s strong incentives to improve quality and outcomes represent an important complement to the AQC global budget; and the AQC is widely viewed as real world Accountable Care Organization model – now with significant market penetration. Dr. Safran oversees the implementation of the performance incentives, related informatics and the company’s ongoing engagement with its provider network to monitor and improve performance on all aspects of the contract.

Dr. Safran is also widely recognized as having contributed to the empirical basis for our nation’s push toward a more patient-centered health care system – and for developing measures of patient care experiences that are now used nationwide, accepted as a national standard for this area of measurement, and used by the Medical Boards as part of their recertification process for physicians. Dr. Safran’s advisory roles on national and local quality measurement include work with the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), the American Medical Association’s Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI), the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), and the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC). Dr. Safran co-chaired the Expert Panel on Performance Measurement (EPPM) convened by the Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services and is a member of the Massachusetts Statewide Quality Advisory Council (SQAC).

Dr. Safran earned her masters and doctor of science degrees in Health Policy from the Harvard School of Public Health.