Asaf Bitton, MD

Asaf Bitton, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Health Care Policy at the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His main academic interests are in primary care measurement, payment reform, and improvement. To that end, he both implements and evaluates the scope and quality improvement possibilities of various regional and national primary care transformation initiatives, with a particular focus on the patient-centered medical home model of care. He also studies health information technology approaches for improving patient engagement and clinical quality within these settings. His recent work in this area has been published in JAMA, Health Affairs, Milbank Quarterly, Archives of Internal Medicine, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and Medical Care.

He is the Associate Program Director with Ariadne Labs on the Primary Health Care Performance Initiative. This joint effort with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank, aims to measure, in both traditional and novel ways, primary care functions and performance within low and middle income partner countries to understand variation in performance and tailor improvement initiatives.

He is a member of the Harvard Medical School (HMS) Center for Primary Care, where he is the faculty lead for transformation strategy and design. He founded and led the Academic Innovations Collaborative, a learning collaborative of 20 Harvard-affiliated primary care teaching practices transforming toward new models of more effective and reliable team-based primary care.

He currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the Comprehensive Primary Care initiative at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. This national multi-payer initiative combines payment reform and practice redesign to transform 500 primary care practices in 8 states over 4 years with the overarching goal of improving quality of care, patient experience, and reducing costs.