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Dr. Tara Kiran, MD, MSc, CCFP, FCFP

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Tara Kiran has accepted the roles of the Fidani Endowed Chair of Improvement and Innovation in Family Medicine and Vice-Chair, Quality and Innovation in the Department of Family and Community Medicine (DFCM) at the University of Toronto beginning July 1st, 2018.

"Throughout my career, I have always been motivated to improve the health care system and the care we provide to patients," says Dr. Kiran, an Assistant Professor at DFCM and a family doctor at St. Michael's. "It's a great privilege to be able to be in this position where I can help us take a step back to think about primary care and how we can do even better to serve our patients."

Through her work in both roles, Dr. Kiran will lead change in the delivery of primary health care through quality improvement and innovation initiatives within DFCM and its teaching sites, as well as influence health policy and practice provincially, nationally and internationally.

Dr. Kiran comes to this position with ample experience: she has worked as both a community and academic physician in various areas of Ontario and has held several leadership positions, most recently working with Health Quality Ontario as a Canadian Institute of Health Research-funded Embedded Clinician Researcher to better understand what matters most to patients in the transition from hospital to home.

Over the last seven years, she has served as QI Program Director at the St. Michael's Academic Family Health Team's, which includes approximately 70 staff physicians, 40 resident physicians and 60 non-physician health professionals serving over 44,000 patients at six clinics.

"I'm particularly proud of how we've been able to improve patient experience at St. Michael's by working with patients to design and implement QI initiatives," says Dr. Kiran. "Understanding and improving patients experience and working with patients to improve the health care system is an important lens I want to bring to this role."

Dr. Kiran vision for QI at DFCM is multifaceted: she aims to continue to inspire and educate residents and faculty in QI by building on an already robust QI curriculum, use tools like UTOPIAN to find new interventions that focus on improving health outcomes, and engage patients and partners to make system-wide changes. Dr. Kiran is also passionate about health equity and wants to ensure that DFCM's QI work addresses the needs of our most vulnerable populations.

"Overall I see us leading by example. I want us to demonstrate that we are a high performing health care system through data and stories," says Dr. Kiran. "And when people think of high performing primary care, I want them to think about the University of Toronto and our department."

Dr. Kiran assumes this position from Dr. Philip Ellison, who has led the Quality and Innovation program since its inception in 2010. Through his hard work and dedication to improving the health care system, Dr. Ellison's work has provided DFCM residents, faculty and family physicians throughout Ontario with the tools required to deliver the best in patient care.

"It's really important to recognize how far we've come," says Dr. Kiran. "I joined the Quality Improvement team when it was just getting started in 2011. We had so much to learn. Dr. Ellison did a tremendous job to getting us where we're at today – he and our department were really ahead of their time. It's an honour to build on his legacy."