Alisa B. Busch, MD, MS

Alisa B. Busch, MD, MS, is an associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital and associate professor of health care policy at the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. She is chief of the Health Services Research Division for Partners Psychiatry and Mental Health and an attending psychiatrist in McLean’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Partial Hospital Program.

Dr. Busch’s main academic interests are in measuring and improving mental health and substance use disorder (MH/SUD) treatment quality. Her research focuses on developing quality measures, informed by expert guidelines/consensus, and applying them to examine changes in MH/SUD treatment quality. Her research documents changes in treatment quality, among a variety of patient diagnostic populations, and in large systems of care. An additional focus of her research is how changes in MH/SUD healthcare policy, delivery, and financing affect mental health care quality, utilization, and spending. 

Consistent with her interest in treatment quality assessment and improvement, Dr. Busch is McLean Hospital’s chief medical information officer and director of clinical performance measurement and health services research. She directs the hospital’s electronic medical record and Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement (PROMs) program. McLean’s PROMs program informs individual patient care by providing immediate and longitudinal feedback about patient symptom severity and improvement during treatment, provides aggregate information to measure program outcomes over time, and facilitates clinical research. 

Dr. Busch is nationally recognized for her work on measuring MH/SUD treatment quality in systems of care. She has served on national technical expert panels on quality measurement in usual care MH/SUD treatment settings for the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA), and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). Most recently she has served on the CMS Technical Expert Panel for Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities (IPF) Measure Development and Maintenance Project for the development of new IPF quality measures for psychiatric facilities.

Dr. Busch is a graduate of New York University with honors in English literature and was a recipient of the University Scholar’s Program. She received her MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed her psychiatry residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. She received her MS in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health.