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Sahar HASHMI, MD

Academic Background:

• 2010 - present • MIT, ESD: PhD candidate in Engineering Systems

Research Domain:

health care systems and management 

Research Description:

Sahar Hashmi is a medical doctor who is pursuing her PhD in MIT's Engineering Systems Division (ESD) with an interest in healthcare systems management. Her research focuses on how to use engineering systems tools to measure and improve the performance and cost of healthcare systems. In one of Dr. Hashmi's projects she used System Dynamics to help decide the most effective non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) for handling of patients within MIT Medical's urgent care unit at the time of a pandemic.

Dr. Hashmi is the medical leader of the MIT chapter of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI). She successfully helped improve the strategies used by MIT Medical to combat the spread of an infectious disease by performing and evaluating an important behavioral research study at the time of flu pandemic in 2009.

Dr. Hashmi is conducting her PhD thesis work in collaboration with Harvard Medical School. She is studying the strategies to improve health outcomes of chronic diseases like Diabetes by using advanced technologies. She believes management of chronic diseases like diabetes is a complex scociotechnical systems problem. She is involved in designing an improved model of care of diabetes that would potentially improve health outcomes and lower cost of care.