Core Faculty

• Peter K. Lindenauer, MD, MSc, FACP
  Peter K. Lindenauer, MD, MSc, FACP is a board-certified internist and the Director of the Center. He also serves as the Medical Director of Clinical Decision Support and Quality Informatics for Baystate Health and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine. He is nationally recognized for his use of large administrative datasets to measure the quality of care for patients with pneumonia and COPD, to evaluate policy level and structural approaches to quality improvement, including pay-for-performance and the use of hospitalists, and for observational studies of treatment effectiveness in perioperative medicine. His work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Health Affairs and elsewhere. In 2008, he received the Excellence in Research award from the Society of Hospital Medicine. 

  Dr Lindenauer has played an active role in numerous national quality and safety efforts. He has served as a member of technical expert panels for the National Quality Forum, the National Surgical Care Improvement Project and CMS’s Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System. He is an advisor to AHRQ’s Web M&M (the online journal of patient safety), is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, and recently completed a 1 year term on the Inpatient Functionality Workgroup of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology.

• Evan M. Benjamin, MD, FACP
  Evan M. Benjamin, MD, FACP is a board-certified internist and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences as well as Vice President/Chief Quality Officer for Baystate Health in Springfield, Massachusetts. Nationally recognized for his work in outcomes management, and quality-of-care improvement, his publications have appeared in more than 25 articles in major journals. His research in measuring quality, patient safety and health policy has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. He has contributed to four books including Measuring and Managing Healthcare Quality (Healthcare 2001).

• Jan Fitzgerald MS, RN, CPHQ
  Jan Fitzgerald, MS, RN, CPHQ is the Director for Quality at Baystate Medical Center. She has a Master’s Degree from UMASS; Her clinical experience includes work in critical care, emergency medicine, general surgery and orthopedics. She oversees clinical performance improvement, measurement, quality reporting and functions as the site coordinator for several projects. Jan speaks nationally and has written numerous articles on the several topics including quality and safety. She has been successful in engaging clinicians to incorporate evidence based interventions into daily practice as well as refocusing the culture of patient care team.

• Michael Rothberg, MD, MPH
  Michael Rothberg, MD, MPH is board-certified internal medicine, is an Associate Professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine, and the Director of Scholarly Activities for the internal medicine training program at Baystate Medical Center. His research interests include cost-effectiveness and comparative effectiveness of diagnosis and treatment of common medical conditions such as influenza, pneumonia, COPD, and sepsis. He has been published widely on the cost-effectiveness of antiviral therapy and vaccination for influenza.

• Tara Lagu, MD, MPH
  Tara Lagu, MD, MPH is a registered pharmacist, a board-certified internist, and an Assistant Professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine. She is a recent graduate of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania where she studied the impact of patient comorbidity on quality of care. This work inspired her current research which focuses on health information technology and the relationship between health care costs and quality.

• Penelope Pekow, PhD
  Penny Pekow, PhD is the senior biostatistician for the Center of Quality of Care Research, an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Director of the Biostatistics Consulting Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her research has included a clinical trial of diabetes therapy for cystic fibrosis related diabetes; studies of physical activity during pregnancy and maternal outcomes; population-based approaches for examining the effect of infertility treatment on human development; and diagnosis and treatment of osteoporosis. Recent work focuses on application of analytic methods for use with large observational databases with multi-level hierarchical data structures.

Research Core

• Jill Avrunin, MS
  Jill Avrunin, MS is a biostatistician with the Center. Prior to coming to Baystate Health, she worked in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has included modeling mortality in the intensive care unit; studies on the natural history of AIDS; worksite studies to educate people about food, exercise, and smoking, and to change unhealthy behaviors; studies to improve rates of mammography and colorectal cancer screening; studies concerning osteoporosis in the United States; and studies about exercise during pregnancy and its relationship to the development of gestational diabetes.

• Aruna Priya, MS
  Aruna Priya is a biostatistician with the Center. Before joining Baystate Health, she worked for the department of emergency medicine at the Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, New York. In that position, her responsibilities included consulting on trials on wound irrigation methods in the ER; comparing extubation force methods; developing scoring systems for predicting the need for laparotomy in ER situations; studying patterns of intimate partner violence; analyzing the effect of seating on occupant mortality; and understanding safest seating position in a car in the event of a crash.

• Long-Chau Van, BA
  Long-Chau Van is a research assistant in the Center for Quality of Care Research at Baystate Medical Center. She recently graduated from Smith College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. Her research interests include studying hospital public reporting and medical interpreters.

Adjunct Faculty

• Sarah Goff, MD
  Sarah Goff, MD is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Tufts University School of Medicine. Prior to arriving at Baystate, she practiced in Community Health Centers in Western Massachusetts, served as Assistant Medical Director and Medical Director of a school-based health center, and completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University. Her research scope includes the impact of patient-doctor communication on quality of care and patient safety.

• Sarah Haessler, MD
  Sarah Haessler, MD is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. She is the Hospital Epidemiologist in the Division of Healthcare quality and an Infectious Diseases consultant at Baystate Medical Center. Her research interests include infections due to Staphylococcus aureus, the role of antibiotics in Clostridium difficile infection, and systems modifications to prevent hospital-acquired infections. 

• Gary Kanter, MD
  Gary Kanter, MD is a staff anesthesiologist and director of the anesthesia preadmission evaluation clinic at BMC. He also is an Associate Medical Director of Health Care Quality. His interests include process improvement, reducing perioperative risk, and the Surgical Care Improvement Project.

• Randolph Peto, MD, MPH
  Randolph Peto, MD, MPH is the medical director for Quality and Patient Safety at Baystate Medical center, is board-certified in Preventive Medicine, and is Assistant Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. He served for over a decade as a medical director with Massachusetts’ federally-funded quality improvement organization. At Baystate, he has focused particularly on disclosure & apology promotion, dissemination of team communication training, and safety culture measurement and improvement. His research interests also include the intersection of the above with compassionate caregiving, and human factors engineering.

• Karthik Raghunathan, MD, MPH
  Karthik Raghunathan MD, MPH is board-certified in anesthesiology and critical care medicine and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. His research interests lie within the areas of perioperative medicine and quality improvement, with a specific focus on translation and application of evidence into clinical practice.

• Cheryl Reilly, RN, PhD
  Cheryl Reilly, RN, PhD  is a Nurse Researcher in Patient Care Services at BMC and is currently examining fall risk assessment tools, prevention strategies, and related outcomes. Her research interests include patient safety, health services, and informatics, with a specific focus on capturing patient’s perceptions of their health status in the electronic patient record to enhance safety and quality of health care. She has experience designing, implementing, and evaluating clinical information and decision support systems for patients and providers as a Corporate Manager in the Clinical Informatics Research and Development group at Partners Healthcare System and is the recipient of an AHRQ dissertation award to develop and test an automated symptom checklist completed by patients hospitalized in an acute care facility.

• Mihaela Stefan, MD
  Mihaela Stefan, MD is a board-certified internist, Director of the Medical Consultation Program and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine. Her interests include perioperative medication management, development of hospital-based strategies for reduction of hospital readmissions, and the relationship between process of care measures and hospital readmission rates, a project for which she recently received a Baystate Medical Center Incubator Fund Award.

• Jay Steingrub, MD
  Jay Steingrub, MD is a Professor of Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine at Baystate Medical Center (BMC) has distinguished himself as an outstanding clinician, educator and clinical investigator. As Director of the the Medical Intensive Care Unit. Steingrub has built a nationally recognized program in clinical research devoted to sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). He has served as principal investigator or co-investigator on 42 extramurally funded clinical trials and has been funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to study Acute Lung Injury as part of a ARDS network consortium. Steingrub’s work continues to focus on optimal strategies to deliver clinical care in the ICU setting for patients with sepsis and ARDS and currently is examining the utility of novel compounds in the treatment of sepsis and ARDS.

• Garry W. Welch, PhD
  Garry W. Welch, PhD, is director of Behavioral Medicine Research at Baystate Medical Center and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine who is a reviewer on the Behavioral Medicine Interventions and Outcomes study section at the NIH. Welch is working to decrease costs and improve medical care and patient self-management behaviors for type 2 diabetes by providing clinicians with computer-based case management tools that incorporate evidence-based guidelines for clinical practice and patient self-management support. Welch is in the final year of a five-year NIH R01 grant to compare the use of motivational interviewing (MI) with computer-assisted assessment of patient self-management and behavioral barriers and is a Co-Investigator on 2 other NIH funded diabetes translational research studies. He is also currently developing projects that examine new technologies for improving medication adherence using on a new home monitoring medication adherence device as well as examining the role of behavioral change and weight loss following gastric bypass surgery.

• Surinder Yadav, MD
  Surinder Yadav, MD is a board-certified internist, Associate Medical Director, Division of Healthcare Quality at Baystate Medical Center, and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine. Prior to arriving at Baystate, he completed a four year basic science research training program at Duke University and a postdoctoral Rhodes Scholarship at the University of California at San Francisco. His research interests include the impact and reliability of clinical practice guidelines, workflow interruptions in hospital medicine, impact and prevention of urinary tract infections, and standardization of palliative care.