Dana Gelb Safran

Dana Gelb Safran, Sc.D. is President & CEO of the National Quality Forum (NQF), and Chief Scientific Officer of the Joint Commission (TJC). In this role, Dr. Safran leads NQF’s portfolio of work advancing next generation healthcare quality measures, methods and practices to improve healthcare quality, outcomes, safety and affordability, including new products and services being offered in partnership with The Joint Commission. Dr. Safran is an internationally recognized healthcare executive with a unique blend of accomplishment in business and academia. A central feature of her work has been combining the science of quality measurement with the art of its use to drive significant change in the quality, outcomes, and affordability of care. Dr. Safran’s prior roles include serving for more than a decade as a senior executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA), where she was a lead architect of the BCBSMA Alternative Quality Contract (AQC), which is widely credited with having catalyzed the value-based payment movement among public and private payers nationally. She was also a founding member of the executive team at Haven, a joint venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase to achieve better health outcomes, care experiences, and costs of care through innovation in care delivery, benefit design and purchasing. Dr. Safran is on the faculty of Tufts University School of Medicine and has held a broad range of advisory roles in the public sector and internationally supporting efforts to improve health and healthcare through effective uses of performance measurement. From 2017-2023, she served as a Commissioner of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in 2024. She holds a BA in Biology and Government from Wesleyan University and completed her post-graduate studies at the Harvard School of Public Health to earn an ScM and ScD in Health Policy and Management.