Rishi Wadhera, MD, MPP, MPhil

Rishi K. Wadhera, MD, MPP, MPhil is an Associate Director of the Smith Center for Outcomes Research and the Section Head of Health Policy and Equity at the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research. In addition, he is a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health, the Associate Program Director of the Cardiovascular Medicine Fellowship, and the Clinical Head of High Value Care at the Center for Health Care Delivery Science at BIDMC. He received his MD from the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, his MPhil in public health from the University of Cambridge, and his MPP from Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government. He completed both his residency in internal medicine and his fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Dr. Wadhera serves as Senior Associate Editor for Health Services Research Journal, is on the Editorial Board for Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes and for Health Services Research, is an Editor for the Health Disparities Issue of Circulation and serves as an ad hoc reviewer for many high-impact journals. In addition, he teaches "Essentials of the Profession" in Health Policy at Harvard Medical School and "Health Care Quality and Equity" at Harvard School of Public Health. 

Dr. Wadhera is the PI of multiple NIH R01 grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), and is also a co-investigator on several other R01s. His research program is primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other extramural grants, and research from the section is commonly published in high-impact journals such as NEJM, JAMA, and BMJ. As the Section Head of the Health Policy and Equity section of the Smith Center for Outcomes Research, he uses his expertise in cardiology and public health and policy to drive high-impact research. He has mentored over 30 medical students, residents, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty across the Harvard system and nationally, and is a recipient of the Harvard Medical School Excellence in Mentoring Award (2023). With a focus on cardiovascular risk factors and disease, his section produces work about health policy, public health, health care quality, access, and evaluation, disparities in healthcare, and epidemiology. 

Dr. Wadhera’s main areas of research are (1) use of claims, registry, and survey data to understand health care disparities and health inequities along multiple dimensions, such as poverty, rurality, race and ethnicity, and community disadvantage, (2) evaluation of cardiovascular disease epidemiology, care quality, and outcomes, looking particularly at patient-, health system, and policy-level factors that contribute to changes in cardiovascular disease epidemiology, (3) understanding the effects of state and federal health policies on cardiovascular care, particularly for vulnerable populations, through quasi-experimental methods to real world data, and (4) linking diverse datasets to examine the relationship between different populations and enhance clinical, socioeconomic, and community phenotyping.