Lou Hart, MD

Lou Hart, MD is a practicing Pediatric Hospitalist, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine, and the Medical Director of Health Equity for Yale New Haven Health.

His mission is to identify and eliminate unwanted variations in care and outcomes that exist within our respective systems. Today this needless waste in US healthcare costs us over $320 billion a year; it can and must be removed from our system! The US wastes more money on health system inequities than the federal government spends today on public housing and public education combined.

Dr. Hart started his clinical leadership career as Director of Equity, Quality & Safety at NYC Health + Hospitals, our nation's largest comprehensive safety-net healthcare system. Clinically he loves seeing patients and working with faculty, staff, residents, and medical students to improve the equity, quality & safety of patient care. By leveraging quality improvement and patient safety frameworks and methodologies, he confronts systems-based drivers of inequity through a just culture approach. Academically, he spends time researching and dialoguing with colleagues on the innate flaws of racial essentialism in medicine and its contribution to a lower standard of care for all patients.

Lou was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and grew up playing hockey, basketball, and golf. He studied Financial Economics, Medicine Health & Society, and Philosophy while at Vanderbilt University. He attended medical school at the University of California-San Diego and did his Pediatrics residency training at the NYU School of Medicine. After residency graduation, he completed a one year Clinical Leadership Fellowship at NYC Health + Hospitals in the system's Office of Quality & Safety. He is currently an EMBA '25 candidate at the Yale School of Management and a Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellow in Health Equity Leadership.