Thomas Tsai
Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management
Department of Health Policy and Management
Dr. Thomas Tsai is a health policy researcher and leader in value-based care, clinical transformation, and health system resiliency. He is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard Chan School of Public Health. He is a practicing minimally invasive gastrointestinal and bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
His research focuses on improving value-based care by generating the empirical evidence for clinical transformation in the US. He bridges the the worlds of public health and medical care as well as research and operations by designing, implementing, and evaluating value-based care models. His research evaluates the quality of medical and surgical care episodes across the acute, post-acute, outpatient, and home-based care settings. He has led projects on the Medicare quality programs, utilization of care in Medicare Advantage, quality of care for surgery, patient experience, bundled payments, and hospital management. He has been a thought leader for surgical home hospital and led a randomized controlled trial for home hospital of surgical patients. His work has been published in New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, PNAS, Nature Communications, Health Affairs, Annals of Surgery, and JAMA Surgery. He is a frequent commentator in national media outlets including The New York Ties, Wall Street Journal, and NPR.
During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Dr. Tsai served in the Biden Administration as Senior Policy Advisor for the COVID-19 Response and Testing and Treatment Coordinator on the White House COVID-19 Response Team. He coordinated federal testing efforts through the COVID-19 Testing Board and provided strategic leadership of the national stockpile of COVID-19 tests which distributed over 1.1 billion over the counter and point-of-care tests to long-term care facilities, schools, community health centers, and underserved communities; the Increased Community Access to Testing Program which provided free molecular tests at pharmacies across the US; and the COVIDtests.gov program which delivered over 750 million tests directly to US households. He led the implementation of the Test to Treat program and scaled telehealth and mobile Test to Treat initiatives. He previously served as Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation in the US Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama Administration.
