Alisa B. Busch, MD, MS

Alisa B. Busch, MD, MS, a psychiatrist and clinical informaticist, 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 also the Mass General Brigham (MGB) Assistant Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) for McLean Hospital and system Behavioral and Mental Health and is Chief of the Health Services Research Division at McLean Hospital. 

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 in administrative data. Her research documents changes in treatment quality, among a variety of patient diagnostic populations, and in large systems of care. Other foci of her research are how changes in MH/SUD healthcare policy, delivery, and financing affect mental health care quality and utilization, and the use of new technology and digital health care (such as telemedicine, electronic health records) in MH/SUD care. 

Through her work as CMIO and as a MH/SUD policy and services researcher, Dr. Busch has made a variety of contributions to care quality via measurement-based care, digital health, and the use of data to inform process and quality improvement at McLean, MGB and nationally. She is a nationally recognized expert in process and outcome quality measurement in clinical care, in understanding how changes in policy or system organization are associated with differences in healthcare quality and utilization, and in the use of digital health in MH/SUD care. She has served on a variety of national committees and technical expert panels related to developing behavioral health quality measures (Institute of Medicine, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Agency for Health Care Research and Quality). 

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.