Baystate Medical Center Welcomes Dr. Yvonne Cheung to Dual Leadership Role

SPRINGFIELD — Baystate Health announced that Dr. Yvonne Cheung has been named associate chief medical officer (ACMO) and associate chief quality officer (ACQO) for Baystate Medical Center. She will join Baystate in February 2024.

In her roles as associate chief medical officer and associate chief quality officer, Cheung will provide leadership for hospital-wide quality and patient-safety programs, focusing efforts on processes that improve outcomes in quality, safety, and value of care at Baystate Medical Center. She will also work with members of senior management and physician leaders to design and implement operational strategies and tactics to improve patient outcomes and safety.

With a clinical background in anesthesiology, Cheung completed quality-and-safety and medical-education fellowships at Harvard Medical School and brings significant leadership experience to the roles of ACMO and ACQO. She has held the positions of medical director of Quality and Safety, chief Quality and Safety officer, and vice president of Quality and Safety at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where she was integral to the hospital’s success in developing patient-safety and quality-improvement initiatives, including the implementation of a structured process and mnemonic (IPASS) to improve the reliability of information exchange at handoffs and transitions of care, which received the 2016 John Eisenberg Team Award for patient safety. She also implemented pre-operative safety huddles in the operating room and developed a risk-mitigation strategy to support the implementation of a new, unified electronic health record (Epic Systems).

Accolades received under Cheung’s leadership at Mount Auburn Hospital include an ‘A’ grade from Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grades, awards for excellence from U.S. News and World Report and Healthgrades, and a CMS 5-star rating for quality, placing Mount Auburn among the top 15% of hospitals nationwide.

Most recently, she served as associate chief medical officer and vice president for Quality and Safety at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Newton, where she convened a task force of safety and risk leaders across Mass General Brigham (MGB) to standardize the MGB Safety Reporting System. She was also responsible for maintaining regulatory compliance and readiness for surveys, which resulted in successful Joint Commission reaccreditation surveys, as well as CMS and DPH inspections.

Cheung earned her MD from Columbia University, her MPH from Harvard School of Public Health, and her MBA from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.