Karthik Sivashanker, MD

American Medical Association

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Dr. Karthik Sivashanker is the Vice President of Equitable Health Systems & Innovation in the Center for Health Equity at the American Medical Association, and a Medical Director in Quality, Safety, and Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He's a psychiatrist at Justice Resource Institute and serves as a faculty member at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Dr. Sivashanker attended college and medical school at Northwestern University in Illinois. He completed psychiatry residency at NYP Weill Cornell in New York and a psychosomatic medicine fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is a graduate of the Harvard Medical School Fellowship in Patient Safety and Quality and received a Master’s in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. As a former Fulbright scholar, he conducted research in Venezuela on the vertical transmission of HIV/AIDS in rural mountain communities. As a former VA Under Secretary for Health Diffusion of Excellence Gold Fellow, he led efforts to standardize and improve the process of substance use screening and triage for Veterans. His work has focused on driving racial justice and equity in the health care arena by leveraging high-performance quality and safety practices to systematically make inequities visible and to address and resolve them as an integral part of health care delivery.