Michael L. Gustafson, MBA, MD

Biography

Dr. Michael Gustafson is currently the Senior Vice President for Clinical Excellence, at Brigham & Women’s and Faulkner (BWF) Hospitals in Boston, MA. In his current role as Senior Vice President, Dr. Gustafson has oversight for guiding the institution’s strategies for clinical performance measurement, analysis, improvement, and planning — across such dimensions of care as service excellence, operational efficiency, quality, and patient safety. He also serves as the principal quality liaison and representative for the institution within Partners HealthCare System and with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He is the Executive Sponsor for a hospital-wide Balanced Scorecard reporting and management system at BWH, one of the first of its kind to be implemented in a U.S. academic medical center. In 2005-6, he also assumed direct operational responsibility for the institution’s Pharmacy and Pathology Services.

Dr. Gustafson serves as an Instructor in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, with research interests including the relationships between volume and quality, measurement of risk-adjusted surgical outcomes, and the application of human factors and systems thinking concepts to patient safety. He completed his MD degree at West Virginia University, his General Surgery residency at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and a 3-year NIH-funded surgical research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He later went on to become one of the first surgeons to ever receive an MBA degree from Harvard Business School, where he graduated in 1999 with honors.