Sonali P. Desai, MD, MPH

Dr. Sonali Desai is a rheumatologist and serves as the chief quality officer and vice president at BMC Health System and associate professor at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. As BMC Health System’s chief quality officer, Dr. Desai oversees the hospital’s strategic delivery of high-quality, safe, and equitable patient care.

Most recently, Dr. Desai served as the vice president for quality and the associate chief medical officer at Brigham & Women's hospital and has been recognized by Becker's Healthcare as a patient safety expert to know. Dr. Desai conducts research on improving the quality of care and patient safety, with a focus on the ambulatory setting, and has published more than 55 peer-reviewed publications. She currently serves as a deputy editor at the International Journal for Quality in Healthcare. In 2019, she received the Donabedian Award in Quality & Safety from the American Public Health Association for Ambulatory Safety Nets and Diagnostic Error Reduction. She has also taught internationally in quality and safety, and was a founding program director at Harvard Medical School for the Safety, Quality, Informatics, and Leadership Program. Dr. Desai has been recognized as a Top Doctor by Boston Magazine since 2020 with twenty years of experience caring for complex patients with autoimmune diseases in her rheumatology practice.

Dr. Desai attended college and medical school at Brown University, and she obtained her master’s in public health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She completed her internal medicine residency and chief residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and her rheumatology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.