About Bala Hota
Bala Hota MD, MPH, is the Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer for Rush University Medical Center (RUMC) in Chicago, IL. At RUMC, Dr. Hota leads the enterprise in the use of data and information to drive change. He has overseen a consolidation of reporting tools into the Epic EMR, encouraging the development of standard dashboards that display the top 250 metrics for executive leaders. Dr. Hota has also spearheaded the use of “big data” technologies, leveraging Cloudera’s suite of products for a clinical data lake.
Under Dr. Bala Hota’s leadership, predictive models have been deployed into the EMR for readmissions, Emergency Department throughput, sepsis, among others, that deeply integrate into clinical workflows. His team is also developing machine learning models to provide real-time feedback to clinicians for opportunities for care improvement. Rush was the third site in the world to achieve the elite Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) Stage 7 for the Adoption Model for Analytics Maturity (AMAM) certification, indicating the highest level of analytics use in a healthcare setting. As an Associate Chief Medical Officer, he oversees the use and integration of data analytics for quality improvement.
At Rush UMC, Dr. Bala Hota and the team have also developed novel risk adjustment algorithms that link hospital inpatient quality, reimbursement, and outpatient health risk assessments to optimize risk adjustment in clinical care.
In addition to working as Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer, Dr. Bala Hota is a member of the Rush University Medical Center faculty as a Professor of Medicine. He also has over 60 publications in medical journals. Some of the areas in which Dr. Bala Hota has been published include antibiotic-resistant bacteria, how to accurately measure healthcare quality, and methods to use computer algorithms to improve healthcare.
For his undergraduate education, Dr. Bala Hota attended the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences, where he earned a BS in Biology. He then attended the University of Miami School of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree. He completed his Categorical Internal Medicine Residency at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in 1999, where he also completed a Fellowship Program in Infectious Diseases. Dr. Hota then decided to further his education and went on to earn his Masters in Public Health from the University of Illinois in 2004.
Dr. Bala Hota has served as Chair on numerous committees, including the Rush Quality–IT Committee, the Rush Population Health Quality Committee, The IT Steering Committee at Cook County Health and Hospitals System, and the Cook County Health and Hospitals System Information Services Clinical Advisory Committee. Additionally, Dr. Hota has also been a member of the Scientific Leadership Council Leadership Committee (part of the Rush Translational Science Consortium) and the Drug Utilization and Evaluation Committee for the Cook County Health and Hospitals System.
In 2013, Dr. Bala Hota received the Quinton Young Award, which is given annually to one faculty member for exceptional contributions as a department leader, role model, and physician.
Currently, along with his other work, Dr. Bala Hota is actively developing novel machine learning methods for use in health care quality measurements and hoping these can help to enhance patient choice of healthcare setting.
