Niteesh Choudhry, MD, PhD
Dr. Niteesh K. Choudhry is a professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a 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 (BWH), where he also a practicing hospitalist. He is also director of Implementation Research and Education and associate director for Postgraduate Education in Clinical and Translational Science for Harvard Catalyst.
Much of Dr. Choudhry’s 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. His work combines approaches from behavioral and data science to develop scalable solutions for health quality improvement.
He has run numerous large pragmatic trials testing a variety of potential interventions to address these issues in partnership with large delivery systems and health insurers around the US. These include, among others, the Post-Myocardial Infarction Free Rx and Event and Economic Evaluation (MI FREEE) trial, the Randomized Evaluation to Measure Improvements in Nonadherence from low-cost Devices (REMIND) trial, the Study of a Telepharmacy Intervention for Chronic disease to Improve Treatment adherence (STIC 2 IT), Targeted Adherence intervention to Reach Glycemic control with Insulin Therapy for Diabetes patients (TARGIT-Diabetes) and the Mail Outreach To Increase Vaccine Acceptance Through Engagement (MOTIVATE) trial,. He is co-principal investigator of the NIA-funded Novel Uses of adaptive Designs to Guide provider Engagement in electronic health records (NUDGE-EHR) trial that is testing the use of behavioral science principles for promoting the deprescribing of high-risk medications in the elderly as well as the NIMHD-funded Reducing Ethnic and racial Disparities by improving Undertreatment, Control and Engagement in Blood Pressure management with health information technology (REDUCE-BP).
He directs two NIA-funded research centers: the Roybal Center for Therapeutic Optimization using Behavioral Science, that is the 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.
A second focus of Dr. Choudhry’s work is predictive analytics. 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 adapted these methods to healthcare costs. He has also evaluated the ability of novel data sources, such as retail purchasing information and electronic health record data, to improve predictive ability.
Dr. Choudhry attended McGill University, received his MD and completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of Toronto and then served as Chief Medical Resident for the Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospitals. He earned his Ph.D. 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 250 papers in leading medical and policy journals and has won numerous awards for excellence in research, teaching and mentorship.