Arjun Venkatesh, MD, MBA, MHS, is chair of Emergency Medicine for Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and chief of Emergency Medicine for Yale New Haven Hospital. He is trained to treat acute emergency conditions. The most common of those are what he describes as the “big five conditions for which minutes matter,” including heart attack, stroke, cardiac arrest, trauma, and sepsis.
Choosing to pursue emergency medicine was difficult, says Dr. Venkatesh, explaining that he knew it would involve working evenings, overnights, weekends, and holidays since people have emergencies at all times. “But it offered me the opportunity to care for patients at their greatest or most critical time of need—and it fed my curiosity with new diagnostic puzzles to solve every day,” he says. It also allowed him to provide care in the health care safety net and work to improve health equity, he adds.
Dr. Venkatesh says visiting the emergency department (ED) can be hard for patients. Time-sensitive diagnostic tests and treatments required for some conditions can make any experience there feel chaotic and rushed. “I try to make patients feel comfortable with simple but important gestures, including listening to their personal story, offering to update family or loved ones who may not be in the ED, or by just offering a ginger ale or warm blanket,” he says.
In addition to caring for patients in emergency medicine, Dr. Venkatesh is an associate professor at Yale School of Medicine and a scientist at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) at Yale. His laboratory at Yale includes a multidisciplinary team of implementation experts and investigators who focus on improving the quality and value of emergency and acute care by expanding access, translating knowledge into effectiveness, improving affordability, and reducing disparities.
In addition, Dr. Venkatesh serves as the principal investigator of the American College of Emergency Physicians Emergency Quality Network, a quality improvement and learning network of more than 1,500 emergency departments and 25,000 emergency physicians. His scholarship has informed numerous emergency and acute care quality measurement standards in federal programs, including the Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings. He has published approximately 200 peer-reviewed studies and federal technical reports focused on the quality and value of health care delivery.
