Asaf Bitton, MD, MPH

Asaf Bitton, MD, MPH is the Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He leads Ariadne Labs’ efforts to design, test, and spread scalable solutions that make domestic and global health systems more safe, equitable, and integrated. 

He has served as a senior advisor for primary care policy at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in the US since 2012, helping to design and implement five major primary care initiatives (CPC, CPC+, PCF, MCP, PC FLEX), representing the largest tests of combined primary care payment and clinical practice transformation work in the United States. He was a core founder and vice chair of the steering committee for the Primary Health Care Performance Initiative, an 8-year partnership that included more than 25 countries and the World Bank, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, The Global Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others, dedicated to improving the global provision of primary health care.

Dr. Bitton practices primary care at Brigham and Women’s South Huntington clinic, a team-based community primary care practice in urban Boston that he helped found in 2011. He currently serves on the boards of the National Committee for Quality Assurance and for Health Leads in the US. He is a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security, the National Advisory Committee for Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin, and is an elected member of the International Academy of Quality and Safety. He formerly served on the National Advisory Council for the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the US. 

He was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (US) committee that produced the widely cited report Implementing High-Quality Primary Care: Rebuilding the Foundation of Health Care in 2021, and currently serves on the National Academies Standing Committee for Primary Care, co-chairing the payment workgroup.He is the recipient of the 2023 Barbara Starfield Primary Care Leadership Award. A full list of his academic scholarship (over 140 papers) can be found here.