Lifespan has hired Babar Khokhar, MD, MBA, for the role of Executive Vice President and Chief Physician Officer, overseeing medical affairs, physician practices, outpatient care locations, and community health services, with a start date of February 1, 2024. Khokhar will also serve as Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs (Lifespan) at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
Khokhar comes to Lifespan from Yale School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Health System in Connecticut, where he most recently served as chief medical officer at Yale Medicine and chief ambulatory medical officer at Yale-New Haven Health System. He previously served as the chief clinical transformation officer and interim chief executive officer at Yale Medicine.
Khokhar oversaw regional medical directors, risk management, patient relations, credentialing, clinical innovation, population health, and helped improve the clinical operations of ambulatory locations across the enterprise. He established a system-wide ambulatory operations group that developed ambulatory practice standards and ambulatory dashboards for clinicians, managers, and leadership. He helped create an innovative model that gave the emergency departments and acute care teams same day access to schedule patients, which helped facilitate timelier discharges.
Khokhar founded and led the Yale Clinical Optimization Services, which implemented initiatives that helped reduce provider workloads, such as changing workflows to improve efficiencies and using virtual scribes and novel care team models. He helped develop and support the population health platform for Yale Medicine with innovative programs such as the behavioral health collaborative and eConsult initiative. Lastly, Khokhar was instrumental in laying the groundwork for aligning physician groups across the health system and ensuring support for the wellbeing of the staff and clinicians.
“Lifespan is fortunate to have recruited such a talented and visionary executive during a critical time in healthcare, when operational innovation is becoming more and more essential to long term success in this industry,” said Lifespan President and CEO John Fernandez. “With his history of enterprise-level clinical care delivery transformation, Dr. Khokhar is a welcome addition to the Lifespan team, and I look forward to working with him.”
While at Yale, Khokhar also held academic and clinical positions as associate dean for clinical affairs at the Yale School of Medicine and vice chair for operations in the Department of Neurology.
Khokhar holds a BA in neuroscience and economics from Johns Hopkins University, and an MD and MBA from Tufts University School of Medicine. He completed an internship in internal medicine and a residency in neurology at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he was chief resident. He also completed a fellowship in neuromuscular medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.