President and Chief Executive Officer, National Quality Forum (NQF)

Dana Gelb Safran, ScD, is an internationally recognized healthcare executive with a unique blend of accomplishments in business and academia.

Dr. Safran’s prior roles include serving for more than a decade as a senior executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA), where she was a lead architect of the BCBSMA Alternative Quality Contract (AQC), which is widely credited with having catalyzed the value-based payment movement among public and private payers nationally. She was a founding member of the executive team at Haven, a joint venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase to achieve better health outcomes, care experiences, and costs of care through innovation in care delivery, benefit design and purchasing. Most recently, she was an executive team member at WELL Health, Inc., a health care technology company. Additionally, Dr. Safran is on the faculty of Tufts University School of Medicine and has held a broad range of advisory roles in the public sector and internationally supporting efforts to improve health and healthcare through effective uses of performance measurement. Since 2017, she has served as a Commissioner of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC).

Dr. Safran holds a BA in Biology and Government from Wesleyan University and completed her post-graduate studies at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, earning ScM and ScD in Health Policy and Management. She is married to Alan P.G. Safran (Founder and CEO, SAGA Education), a passionate social entrepreneur with an unwavering commitment to closing the educational achievement gap and enabling success in college and beyond for young people growing up in America’s cities. Together they are the unabashedly proud parents of Alison, Michael and Caroline Safran.