Arjun Venkatesh, MD, MBA, MHS, will become chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and chief of Emergency Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital, effective March 1, 2023.
Venkatesh is currently an associate professor in the department and chief of its Section of Administration, and a scientist at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. He also directs the Emergency Department Administration and Leadership Fellowship.
“This is a department that is storied in emergency medicine,” says Venkatesh. “We have built a remarkable academic department that is doing cutting edge research and has trained hundreds of residents who have gone on to lead programs around the country. To follow as the next chair of this department is an honor.”
After receiving his BS in communication sciences and disorders from Northwestern University, Venkatesh earned an MBA in finance from Ohio State University. He returned to Northwestern for his MD degree, followed by an emergency medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. He then earned an MHS from Yale, which he attained while a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar.
Venkatesh serves as the principal investigator of the American College of Emergency Physicians Emergency Quality Network, a quality improvement and learning network of more than 1,500 emergency departments and 25,000 emergency physicians. His scholarship has informed numerous emergency and acute care quality measurement standards in federal programs, including the Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings. He has published approximately 200 peer-reviewed studies and federal technical reports focused on the quality and value of health care delivery.
As chair, Venkatesh plans to broaden the department’s research portfolio, whose funding ranks first in the nation, in ways that shape the practice of emergency medicine everywhere. He will continue developing its residency program—one of the largest in the United States—whose ongoing goal is to train the next generation of leaders in academic emergency medicine.
Through the department’s partnership with the Yale New Haven Health System, Venkatesh also looks forward to enhancing access to quality acute care throughout the region that Yale serves. “We are the safety net of care,” he says. “We are the acute diagnostic center and we are the place that cares for people with heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrests, sepsis, and trauma. We have a real opportunity to make sure that anyone in our area who has a time-sensitive healthcare need, for which minutes matter, gets the highest quality specialized care available.”
Venkatesh says he also is committed to sustaining the department’s success in recruiting and retaining a diverse group of residents and faculty. Additional plans include elevating the visibility of the department’s vanguard programs in point-of-care ultrasound, emergency medical services, global health, and simulation, and geriatric emergency care.
He is grateful, he says, for “the amazing human talent in the Department of Emergency Medicine, which combined with the rich environment of collaboration at Yale School of Medicine and Yale University is sure to support another generation of success.”
About Yale School of Medicine:
The school was established in 1810 as the Medical Institution of Yale College. The current name, Yale School of Medicine, was adopted in 1918.
Milton C. Winternitz, who served as dean from 1920 to 1935, was the architect of the school’s unique educational philosophy, the Yale system of medical education, which emphasizes critical thinking in a nongraded, noncompetitive environment and requires students to write a thesis based on original research.
Harvey Cushing, widely regarded as the father of American neurosurgery and a seminal figure in American medicine, joined the faculty late in his career and donated his extensive collection of books to Yale. The medical school library, which bears his name, is regarded as one of the great medical historical libraries of the world.
YSM’s historical contributions to medicine include the first X-ray performed in the United States, the first successful use of penicillin in America, the first use of cancer chemotherapy, and the introduction of fetal heart monitoring, natural childbirth and newborn rooming-in. Yale doctors designed the first artificial heart pump and the first insulin infusion pump for diabetes, and it was here that the means of transmission of the polio virus was established, paving the way for the Salk vaccine. Lyme disease was identified by two Yale physicians in 1975.
More recent milestones include the first transgenic mouse, discovery of the mechanism of protein folding, which is key to understanding neurodegenerative diseases, and discovery of the mechanism of innate immunity, with major implications for infectious disease and cancer. Additional highlights include the first reliable method for early detection of autism and identification of genes associated with hypertension, macular degeneration, dyslexia, and Tourette’s syndrome, among many others.
About Arjun Venkatesh, MD, MBA, MHS:
Dr. Venkatesh is an Associate Professor and Chief of the Section of Administration in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale University. He is also Scientist at the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. He has been funded by the NIH, AHRQ, and the Emergency Medicine Foundation to study health system outcomes and efficiency, and he is supported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as co-Principal Investigator of the Emergency Quality Network (E-QUAL) and for the development of the Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings. He has received over $6 million in grant funding and published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and is senior editor of The Evidence book series. He is national leader within ACEP and SAEM and he serves on expert panels for the National Quality Forum (NQF), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and CMS. His work is also funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Addiction Policy Forum to advance the quality and delivery of emergency and acute care for opioid use disorder.
Dr. Venkatesh earned his undergraduate degree at Northwestern University. He went on to earn an MBA from Ohio State University before completing medical school at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Most recently he completed Emergency Medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program here at Yale University. He is originally from Dayton, OH and resides in New Haven.
Source:
News: https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/venkatesh-will-lead-emergency-medicine-at-yale/
Doctor: https://medicine.yale.edu/lab/venkatesh/profile/arjun-venkatesh/
School: https://medicine.yale.edu/about/