Niteesh K. Choudhry, MD, PhD

Niteesh K. Choudhry, MD, PhD, is a professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and executive director for the Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he also a practicing hospitalist. He is also associate director of the Workforce Development Program and co-director of Dissemination and Implementation for Harvard’s National Institutes of Health-funded Clinical and Translational Science Center (Harvard Catalyst). He directs two National Institute on Aging-funded research centers: the Roybal Center for Therapeutic Optimization using Behavioral Science, which is evaluating the impact of principle-driven interventions to improve medication adherence, and the Massachusetts Artificial Intelligence and Technology Center that fosters the development of AI-enhanced technologies to support healthy aging at home for older adults and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.

Much of Dr. Choudhry’s current research deals with design and evaluation of novel strategies to enhance medication adherence and improve the quality of prescribing for common health care conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. He has led numerous pragmatic trials testing a variety of potential interventions to address these issues in partnership with large delivery systems and health insurers around the U.S. These include the use of financial incentives, pharmacist-led interventions, behavioral interviewing techniques, nudges, smartphone applications, and reminder devices. In ongoing work, he and his colleagues are testing the use of reinforcement learning to personalize text messages, electronic health record decision support, and health information technology tools. 

Dr. Choudhry has also done extensive work attempting to predict which patients will ultimately become non-adherent to their prescribed therapies and why and when this will occur. He and his colleagues have applied and evaluated novel quantitative methods for clustering patients into longitudinal and dynamic adherence trajectories, shown their relationship to long-term clinical outcomes, and demonstrated the capacity to predict a patient’s membership in each of these adherence trajectories with great accuracy.  He has also explored the ability of novel data sources, such as retail purchasing information and electronic health record data, to improve the ability to predict future non-adherence. 

Dr. Choudhry attended McGill University, received his MD, and completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of Toronto. He then served as chief medical resident for the Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospitals. He earned his PhD in Health Policy from Harvard University with a concentration in Statistics and the Evaluative Sciences and was concurrently a post-doctoral fellow in Drug Policy Research at Harvard Medical School. His research has published over 300 papers in leading medical and policy journals and has won numerous awards for excellence in research, teaching, and mentorship.