Dana Gelb Safran

Dana Gelb Safran, ScD, is senior vice president, value-based care and population health at Well Health, Inc., a health care communications technology platform enabling dynamic, two-way, personalized communications between patients and their health care providers and plans. In this role, she leads the company’s work to foster the platform’s uses to improve health care quality, outcomes, and affordability through partnerships with payers and accountable care organization providers. In addition, she is establishing a robust enterprisewide measurement function to systematically quantify customer results and inform continuous improvement and best-practice sharing. Previously, Dr. Safran was a founding executive team member at Haven, the joint venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase formed to improve health, care experiences, and costs through transforming health care delivery and financing. At Haven, Dr. Safran was head of measurement, and head of insurance markets and benefit redesign. In that role, she worked closely with the founding companies to develop and test new insurance benefit designs, care models, and contracting approaches. Dr. Safran was previously chief performance measurement and improvement officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA). As an architect of the BCBSMA Alternative Quality Contract and the leader responsible for its unique use of behavioral economics and payer-provider collaboration to reduce cost while improving quality, Dr. Safran is widely recognized as having contributed to our national push toward value-based payment. Prior to joining BCBSMA, she led a research institute at Tufts University School of Medicine dedicated to developing patient-reported measures of health and health care quality. She remains on the faculty at Tufts and serves on a number of state and national advisory bodies related to health care quality and affordability. Since 2017, Dr. Safran has served as a commissioner on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. She earned her Master and Doctor of Science degrees from the Harvard School of Public Health.