Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Asaf Bitton, M.D., M.P.H., is the executive director of Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Care Policy at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. A globally-recognized leader in health systems innovation, he leads Ariadne Labs’ efforts to design, test, and spread scalable systems-level solutions that improve health care processes, enhance purposeful interactions between patients and their providers, and impact populations at scale.

As a practicing primary care physician and expert in primary health care policy, financing, and delivery, he has served as a senior advisor for primary care policy at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation since 2012. He has helped design and test three major comprehensive primary care payment and delivery initiatives, representing the largest tests of combined primary care payment and clinical practice transformation work in the United States. He currently serves on the Center for Strategic and International Studies Bipartisan Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security, the National Advisory Council for Healthcare Research at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in the U.S., and is an elected member of the International Academy of Quality and Safety.

He previously served as director of Ariadne Labs’ Primary Health Care Program, leading primary care measurement and improvement initiatives in Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe along with previous work at the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care directing regional primary care practice learning collaboratives in Massachusetts. He is a core founder and vice chair of the steering committee for the Primary Health Care Performance Initiative, a partnership that includes more than 20 countries and the World Bank, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, The Global Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others, dedicated to improving the global provision of primary health care. Dr. Bitton practices primary care at Brigham and Women’s South Huntington clinic, a team-based community primary care practice in Boston that he helped found in 2011.