Former HHS leader joins Stanford Health Care as chief health equity officer
Stanford says Dr. Nazleen Bharmal will bring a "collaborative leadership approach" to the academic health system.
Photo courtesy of Stanford Health Care
Stanford Health Care, based out of Palo Alto, California, has tapped Health and Human Services official Dr. Nazleen Bharmal to serve as its first chief health equity officer.
Bharmal, who begins her new role effective this month, will also join the Department of Medicine as a clinical associate professor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health at the Stanford School of Medicine.
WHAT'S THE IMPACT?
Stanford said Bharmal will bring a "collaborative leadership approach" to the academic health system.
In her new role, she will lead Stanford Health Care's efforts to advance the broad goals of eliminating health disparities, and will connect the work across Stanford Medicine's tripartite mission of education, research and patient care.
Her oversight will include integrating health equity best practices across the health care delivery system, including in quality performance, specialty service lines, patient experience and community partnerships.
Bharmal joins Stanford Health Care from the Cleveland Clinic, where she helped develop initiatives focused on implementing a community health strategy centered on health equity, social determinants of health and partnerships with community stakeholders.
Previously, she was director of science and policy in the Office of the Surgeon General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She has served on numerous national and regional advisory committees focused on health equity, preventive health and community outreach.
Bharmal practices primary care internal medicine focused on disease prevention and health promotion, and has received awards for her public health research focusing on health disparities, chronic disease prevention and social determinants of health, said Stanford.
THE LARGER TREND
In 2023 Stanford Health Care implemented inpatient telehealth featuring smooth workflows it said would help increase access to certain underserved populations.
Inpatient telehealth was available, in a nascent form, when Stanford opened a new hospital in 2019, but took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, bolstered by technology that iterated on existing solutions and brought tablets to patients' bedsides.
Jeff Lagasse is editor of Healthcare Finance News.
Email: jlagasse@himss.org
Healthcare Finance News is a HIMSS Media publication.
