Dana Safran* (BCBS-MA)
Dana Gelb Safran, ScD, serves as Co-chair of the Health Care Payment Learning & Action Network’s Population-Based Payment Work Group. She is Chief Performance Measurement & Improvement Officer and Senior Vice President, Enterprise Analytics at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA) and leads the company’s initiatives to measure and improve health care quality, safety, and outcomes. Dr. Safran was among the lead developers of the BCBSMA Alternative Quality Contract (AQC), a provider contract model launched in 2009 with the twin goals of improving quality and outcomes while significantly slowing spending growth. She also retains an active academic practice as a faculty member in the Department of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and has authored more than 75 peer-reviewed articles. She is widely recognized as having contributed to the empirical basis for the nation’s push toward a more patient-centered health care system and for developing measures of patient care experiences that are now used nationwide, accepted as a national standard for this area of measurement, and used by the Medical Boards as part of their recertification process for physicians. Dr. Safran’s advisory roles on national and local quality measurement include work with the Office of the National Coordinator, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the National Quality Forum, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, the Editorial Board of Healthcare: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation, and the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC). At the state level, Dr. Safran serves on the Board of Directors for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation, Associated Early Care and Education, and Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, and she is a member of the Massachusetts Statewide Quality Advisory Council. Dr. Safran earned her master and doctor of science degrees in health policy from the Harvard School of Public Health.