Committed to Serve – Umbereen Nehal

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and don't forget Belonging. Belonging is one of the most crucial aspects we talk less about but greatly impacts us. We also talked about Health Equity, what it means, and what we can do as healthcare leaders - it starts by raising the problem for us to start solving it! Hear why quality is about love and other incredible insights in this conversation with a Top Voice in healthcare, Dr. Umbereen Nehal.

"You have to raise a problem for it to be problem-solved."

MEET OUR GUEST Umbereen S. Nehal, MD, MPH is a Dean’s Fellow and Sloan Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her work is at the intersection of technology, policy, and healthcare delivery to diverse populations.

Umbereen is a recognized thought leader on human-centered health information technology (HIT) design, ethical artificial intelligence (AI), payment reform, quality, and reducing disparities. Educated at Aga Khan University Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Nehal trained at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine followed by the Harvard Pediatric Health Services Research Fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. Four times Dr. Nehal has been named “LinkedIn Top Voice” for “Healthcare” and as a “Top Female Voice” on International Women’s Day. As Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Medical Affairs of Community Healthcare Network, Dr. Nehal led a 14-site multi-specialty certified Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) serving 85,000 New Yorkers including behavioral health integration and telehealth. She had oversight of over 700 staff and a $100 million operating budget.

Dr. Nehal served as Associate Medical Director of MassHealth -- a Medicaid program serving 1.6 million members and accounting for 40% of the state budget -- providing leadership on program development and evaluation, cost effectiveness evaluation, population health initiatives, and state-wide information “HIway” for intraoperability. Dr. Nehal served as clinical lead for the 5-year restructuring to create new Accountable Care Organization (ACO) models, co-leading a successful bid for $1.8b in new investment from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Dr. Nehal has expertise in leading multi-disciplinary teams for change management. She designed novel HIT for Medicare Advantage plans to track and rank new forms of data used for payment by CMS and contributed to a Series C fund raise for a client that offers an integrated cloud-based medial data and extraction platform enhanced by AI and natural language processing (NLP). As an MIT Sloan Fellow Dr. Nehal led an AI-focused hackathon, drawing hundreds of innovators from around the world, for human-centered design solution in the age of COVID-19 and was an invited senior author on a chapter on business models, payment metrics, and business ethics for medical AI.

Dr. Nehal served as co-chair of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Healthcare Delivery and Disparities Research advisory panel, she informed national funding priorities for a portfolio of over $300 million clinical effectiveness evaluations. She co-authored national curriculum on the Patient-Centered Medical Home, now disseminated to over 8,000 residents. She is published on use of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) to promote transition planning for children with disabilities. She provided expert review to the Connecticut Department of Public Health’s medical home curriculum. Elected by her peers, she served as district representative and on the board for the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. A frequent invited stakeholder to the White House, CMS, HHS, and NIH, she was asked to moderate a panel for U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Regina Benjamin. Dr. Nehal served as the Principal Investigator of a community health grant to partner with community-based organizations and faith groups in low-resourced communities to promote improved heart health aligned with the Culture of Health. Dr. Nehal’s national leadership on community engagement won recognition from President Obama.