Michele David has had a long and varied career in medicine. But, she says, it took coming to MIT nine years ago to find “a job that fully engages all of who I am.”
David, a highly accomplished physician, currently serves as chief of clinical quality and patient safety at MIT Health, the Institute’s multispecialty group practice and health resource serving the MIT community — including students, faculty, and staff, as well as affiliated families and retirees. While she began her MIT tenure as a primary care provider in 2015, David now focuses on quality improvement projects for the organization. In particular, she developed and now leads the ambulatory safety net team, which is tasked with creating protocols and workflows for completing health screenings of a variety of disorders and diseases, and for managing abnormal test results.
Much of who David is was shaped by the strong women she looked up to during her childhood in Haiti. Her father died when David was just 6 months old, leaving her mother, a young schoolteacher, with four children, the oldest just 5. Despite having many suitors, she never remarried. In Haiti’s patriarchal society, she later told David, marrying again would have yielded all the power in the household to a man, something she did not want her three young daughters to experience. David’s maternal aunt, who graduated from medical school in Haiti in 1956, completed her residency in the United States, and eventually became chief of pathology at the West Side VA Medical Center in Chicago. She was another role model for David, who nudged her toward a career in medicine. The death of her infant godson from an easily curable diarrheal illness due to the local hospital’s lack of basic medical supplies further strengthened the then-teenage David’s resolve to become someone who could make a difference.
David’s passion for public health and health equity grew as she earned her medical degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine and completed her residency at the New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan. The hospital where she trained was divided into sections for patients who could pay for their care and those who were uninsured. It was also the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and David saw firsthand how fear of the disease led to bias and discrimination against members of already-marginalized communities. At the time, David was not allowed to donate blood alongside other residents, because she was Haitian.
Her subsequent career included training and working in pulmonary critical care medicine, teaching medical students, researching health disparities among populations of Caribbean and African American women, and caring for patients, with a focus on women’s health. David also contributes her knowledge and energy to causes close to her heart. She is chair of the board for Health Equity International; an advisor to the Resilient Sisterhood Project; and a member of the Massachusetts Public Health Council.
By 2015, disillusioned by what she describes as a combination of “the glass ceiling” and “corporate medicine,” David began planning an early retirement. That’s when a member of the leadership team from MIT Health heard about her plans and gave her a call. “I told him all the reasons I wanted to quit medicine. He said, ‘It won’t be like that at MIT Health. Please come join us.’”
At MIT Health, David started as a primary care provider before gradually assuming additional administrative responsibilities for clinical quality and patient safety. While still seeing patients, she wrote and received a grant to develop an “ambulatory safety net” for the organization, a system of check-ins and procedures to help ensure that patients receive care that maximizes positive health outcomes. David started by assembling a team to create a safety net for colorectal cancer screening, which identified and contacted patients who were overdue for screenings or at high risk. Within the first year of the project, scheduled or completed colonoscopies among MIT Health patients in these groups increased from 29 to 97 percent.
Last spring, David transitioned to a full-time administrative role at MIT Health. Her team recently launched additional safety nets for breast cancer screening and behavioral health and is developing safety nets for prostate cancer and lung cancer.
And as for that early retirement? “I don’t have another 20 years left in me,” David says. “But I’d like to stay at MIT for as long as I can.”
Soundbytes
Q: How did you make the decision to assume your current, full-time role as chief of clinical quality and patient safety?
A: It was a role I already had, but I was doing it part time. I was also caring for a very complex panel of patients. When Chief Health Officer Cecilia Stuopis asked me if I would consider doing it full time, I was somewhat ambivalent, because I’ve always enjoyed taking care of patients. I thought about it and realized that it was another way of doing the same thing.
Q: What do you like about working at MIT?
A: Working at MIT Health feels like the first time I’ve been able to use my entire skill set to do my job. I wear my policy and public health hats when I’m working on ambulatory safety nets. I’m able to mentor and advise students, and I collaborate with my colleagues on patient care. I also feel fully supported by MIT Health’s leadership team. They are truly invested in me, and I feel that my work matters — not only to me and to them, but also to my co-workers and direct reports. Because of this, I am able to bring my best self to work.
Q: Have you been able to keep up with your many outside projects while working at MIT?
A: Yes. I lecture regularly on medical racism and health-care disparities at conferences and at other institutions. I continue to create and exhibit fine art quilts. Last year, in my role with the Resilient Sisterhood Project and in conjunction with “Call and Response,” an exhibition at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, I was able to bring a film and panel discussion to campus. The event focused on the “mothers of gynecology,” three enslaved women — Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy — who were forced to undergo numerous experimental surgeries without anesthesia by J. Marion Sims, the South Carolina doctor long recognized as the “father of gynecology.” This is one of the stories I started telling my medical students in the late 1990s, after one student asked me why African American patients are often so distrustful of health care. This history was not in medical textbooks at that time.
Q: What are you proudest of so far in your time at MIT?
A: Even though I’m no longer seeing my own patients in person, I’m making systemic changes that are improving health outcomes for the entire panel of patients at MIT Health.
