Hojjat Salmasian, MD, MPH, PhD

As Vice President and Chief Data and Analytics Officer (CDAO) Dr. Hojjat Salmasian leads the analytics services, data platforms and engineering, data literacy and governance, and data science teams the collective make up CHOP’s Data and Analytics (DnA) team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Salmasian is a primary care physician and medical informaticist by background, and he is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA). He received his MD from Tehran University as well as a Master of Public Health degree before he and his wife immigrated to the United States in 2009. Hojjat then went on to Columbia University where he completed a PhD in Biomedical Informatics.

In 2015, Dr. Salmasian was hired as a faculty member at Columbia University and also joined New York-Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) as Program Director for Research Science. He later became the manager of their data science team. Dr. Salmasian’s success in using analytics and information technology to support Quality and Safety at NYP led to him being recruited by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in 2017, where he established their Data Science and Analytics (DSA) team.

Dr. Salmasian and his team supported a large portfolio of projects at BWH. These include COVID inpatient census predictions, optimization of ambulatory scheduling, development of data-driven solutions to improve coding and documentation, improvements to patient throughput in the operating room, and insights about the key drivers of quality ranking programs such as US News & World Report.

In 2021, the impact of Dr. Salmasian’s work beyond BWH and other hospitals in the Mass General Brigham system (MGB) led to his promotion to Associate Chief Medical Information Officer at BWH and his simultaneous appointment as Vice President for Operational Data Science at MGB. Dr. Salmasian is also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and spends a portion of his time on federally funded research projects as well as teaching and mentorship of trainees and fellows. Dr. Salmasian joined CHOP in August 2022 as Vice President and CDAO.