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Dr. Stella Safo

Dr. Stella Safo

Stella Safo, MD, MPH is a Harvard-trained, board-certified HIV primary care physician, an innovator in designing health care delivery models, and an advocate committed to gender and racial equity and civic engagement in healthcare. She is a founding member of Equity Now at Mount Sinai, VoteHealth 2020 and the Coalition to Advance Antiracism in Medicine. In 2020, Dr. Safo was named one of Modern Healthcare’s top minority clinicians to watch.
Dr. Safo received her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and a public health masters with a focus on global health at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she served as a Zuckerman fellow with the Harvard Center for Public Leadership. She completed a residency in Primary Care and Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York, followed by an HIV fellowship from the HIV Medicine Association. Her training led to an early focus on how the social determinants of health impact the health and wellness of minority populations.
Dr. Safo served as a Senior Medical Director for Clinical Transformation at Mount Sinai Health System, where she and a multidisciplinary team oversaw the system-wide redesign of Sinai’s 50+ primary care practices. This work included leading a practice transformation team to work within Sinai’s diverse eight-hospital system and launching a year-long learning collaborative of physicians and staff to share real-time insights.
She then went on to lead a national health care consulting research group as Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at Premier Inc. There, she oversaw the Applied Science and Implementation Research teams which utilized Premier’s large health care database and real-world research to identify novel clinical findings that impact patient care. These findings were translated to health systems across the US through a health care leaders collaborative that Dr Safo led.
Dr. Safo is a leader in advocacy for gender and racial equity in medicine. In 2019, she joined seven of her colleagues in filing a federal lawsuit against Mount Sinai Health System for gender, age and race discrimination. Through her efforts, she has become a national voice on how to address racism and sexism in medicine, and this collective activism led to the NYC Council passing legislation in 2021 to create a Gender and Racial Equity Advisory Committee. She has continued these efforts with ongoing advocacy to ensure antiracist policies are enacted on the federal level, through her efforts with the Coalition to Advance Antiracism in Medicine.
Dr. Safo is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai where she holds dual appointments in Medicine and Medical Education. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Montefiore Medical System where she serves as the current Director for the Social Medicine Curriculum. Her research areas focus on qualitative analyses of challenges to healthcare delivery for vulnerable populations around the world. She has lectured nationally and continues to teach and mentor students and trainees. In addition to consulting on projects around equitable care model design and to a commitment to social justice work, Dr. Safo also provides clinical care to HIV+ and LGBTQ+ patients in New York.
Dr. Safo serves on several boards including Just Human Productions and ExpandEd Schools; she contributes to global health care delivery with her board role in Praava Health and her membership on the Ghana Physicians and Surgeons Foundation.
Dr. Safo is published in several peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA Open Network and AIDS and Behavior, and she has written for such popular medical media as STAT News and KevinMD on gender equity and physician wellness. She is fiercely committed to community empowerment through knowledge sharing and has given numerous talks on Covid-19, HIV prevention and wellness, and chronic disease management. She has appeared on various television media, including CNN, MSNBC, YahooFinance, CBS, Newsy, and Cheddar.
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