A board-certified practicing HIV primary care physician and public health practitioner, Dr. Stella Safo is dedicated to ensuring everyone has access to the best healthcare.
As a Black woman practicing medicine, Dr. Stella Safo knows firsthand that systemic inequities are baked into healthcare delivery. That’s why redesigning our healthcare system to ensure that everyone has access to the best care is her life’s passion. She believes that now is
the time to call attention to and to work hard to address those inequities.
And that is exactly what she has done. Dr. Safo is a Ghanaian-American, board-certified practicing HIV primary care physician and public health practitioner who has led teams dedicated to healthcare improvement in various settings. In 2021, Dr. Safo created Just Equity
for Health, a health care improvement company that uses advocacy, education and care model design to ensure equitable care delivery across all sectors of medicine.
Trained at Harvard for her B.A., M.D. and M.P.H., she completed internal medicine training at Montefiore’s Primary Care Social Medicine program with a fellowship in HIV care through the HIV Medicine Association.
As the former Senior Medical Director for Clinical Transformation at Mount Sinai Health System, Dr. Safo 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 that 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 U.S. through a health care leaders collaborative that Dr.Safo led.
Currently, 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.
She also continues to be an advocate 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 New York City 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.
In addition to being published in several peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA Open Network and AIDS and Behavior, Dr. Safo has written for such popular medical media as STAT and KevinMD.com on gender equity and physician wellness. Her advocacy efforts have been featured in The New York Times, AP News, and The Wall Street Journal. Her television appearances include MSNBC, CNN, Black News Network, Yahoo Finance and Cheddar.
In 2020, Modern Healthcare named Dr. Safo one of that year’s Minority Clinicians to Watch and she was named as a notable figure in healthcare by Crain in 2021. She is a current New York Academy of Medicine Fellow.