July 7, 2021
Ariadne Labs is pleased to announce Namita Seth Mohta, MD, as the new director of the Serious Illness Care Program, following a national search. As director, Dr. Mohta will lead the staff and faculty of the Serious Illness Care Program, establish programmatic vision and strategy, and sustain and expand the program’s portfolio of research and innovations.
The Serious Illness Care Program is a system-level care delivery model focused on redesigning care so that knowing and honoring patients’ priorities becomes the norm. Clinical trials have shown that the program leads to reduced patient anxiety and depression. Research also demonstrates that the program is associated with improvements in patient and clinician experience. Ariadne’s Serious Illness Care Program team has trained more than 28,000 health professionals in the Serious Illness Conversation Guide and worked with 32 health systems to implement the program to improve conversations and care.
“Dr. Mohta has extensive experience leading teams across the health care ecosystem to develop innovative care delivery models that improve outcomes for patients and populations,” said Asaf Bitton, MD, MPH, Executive Director of Ariadne Labs. “We are confident that under Dr. Mohta’s leadership the Serious Illness Care Program will continue to expand Ariadne Labs’ ability to scale interventions that reduce suffering. Her diverse professional background and active clinical care of patients with serious illness enables her to address issues from multiple perspectives while staying laser-focused on the patient.”
Dr. Mohta has been part of the Ariadne Labs community since 2013. She formally joined the Serious Illness Care Program in 2019 as a faculty member where she has contributed to strategic planning, health system implementation, partnership development, program measurement and evaluation, new solutions design and testing, and academic scholarship. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she helped develop the Serious Illness COVID-19 Response Toolkit, a multi-faceted planning and guidance resource, which has been accessed more than 13,000 times.
Trained in primary care, Dr. Mohta has practiced as an academic hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital since 2006, where a significant portion of her practice includes patients with serious illness. Throughout her clinical career, she has been committed to caring and advocating for patients with serious illness, including a focus on eliciting and honoring their values, goals, and priorities. She continues to train, teach, and mentor medical students and residents.
Dr. Mohta is nationally known as a leader in health care delivery transformation. She serves as the Executive Editor for NEJM Catalyst, a peer-reviewed, academic journal published by the New England Journal of Medicine. NEJM Catalyst is focused on practical innovations in health care delivery. Dr. Mohta is part of the founding leadership team that launched the platform. At NEJM Catalyst she has responsibility for editorial content strategy and quality.
Academically, she is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She has served as faculty and senior advisor to the Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“Ariadne Labs’ commitment to innovating practical, scalable systems-level solutions to address the many gaps in our complex health care ecosystem has been an inspiration to me since I joined the Lab’s community,” said Dr. Mohta. “I am deeply honored to lead the Serious Illness Care Program and for the opportunity to bring my expertise as a clinician and leader to this critically important work. I am committed to building on the team’s success and furthering the team’s mission. We will continue to ask the right questions, pursue excellence in research and scholarship, build community, and develop and spread solutions that have impact in the real world.
“Dr. Mohta brings a combination of clinical expertise, academic rigor and empathy to her new role leading the Serious Illness Care Program,” said Evan Benjamin, MD, MS, Chief Medical Officer of Ariadne Labs. “That, combined with her direct, motivating leadership style will continue to further the program’s goal for every seriously ill patient to receive better care by having high-quality conversations with their clinicians about their goals, values, and priorities.”
Dr. Mohta has worked in many facets of health care, within academia, with provider systems, with innovative start-ups and with non-profit organizations. She has been part of the founding Population Health and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) leadership teams at Mass General Brigham (formerly Partners HealthCare) and the New England Quality Care Alliance (Tufts Medical Center), both in Boston. Her responsibilities have included the design, implementation, and spread of value-based strategies and care models, with a focus on primary and specialty care redesign (including palliative care), telehealth, complex care management, analytics and measurement, and leading culture change across organizations.
She completed her Internal Medicine and Primary Care residency training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Mohta is a graduate of Yale College and Yale School of Medicine.
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About Ariadne Labs:
Ariadne Labs is a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. With a mission to save lives and reduce suffering, our vision is that health systems equitably deliver the best possible care for every patient, everywhere, every time. We use human centered design, health systems implementation science, public health expertise, and frontline clinical care experience to design, test and spread scalable systems-level solutions to some of health care’s biggest problems. From developing checklists and conversation guides to fostering international collaborations and establishing global standards of measurement, our work has been accessed in more than 165 countries, touching hundreds of millions of lives. Visit ariadnelabs.org to learn more and covid19.ariadnelabs.org to learn about our response to COVID-19.
Media Contact:
Brigid Tsai
Email: btsai@ariadnelabs.org