Holyoke Medical Center Names Avadhoot Gokhale Chief Quality Officer

HOLYOKE — Holyoke Medical Center (HMC) has appointed Avadhoot Gokhale chief quality officer, where he is overseeing the Quality Improvement, Safety, and Accreditation departments.

A native of Mumbai, India, Gokhale earned his master’s degree in health management and policy at UMass Amherst in 2004. Previously, he worked with the state Department of Public Health in its lead-poisoning-prevention program and at Tewksbury Hospital.

Before coming to HMC, Gokhale worked as director of Quality and Performance Improvement at UnityPoint Health-Trinity in Rock Island, Ill. He was with UnityPoint Health for nine years.

He believes in studying quality improvement and performance from the perspective of patients, in order to ensure they receive top quality and safety care in a compassionate and efficient manner. “In quality, I work to streamline our internal processes to benefit our patients, and to provide them with fantastic care experiences. It is important to look at these processes from the patient’s perspective — how can we engineer their experiences so that they leave here happy and smiling?”

Spiros Hatiras, president and CEO of Holyoke Medical Center and Valley Health Systems Inc., called Gokhale “a skilled senior executive whose emphasis on looking at quality improvement from a patient’s perspective will further raise Holyoke Medical Center’s well-established commitment to providing high-quality care in a safe and compassionate hospital setting. We are excited to welcome him to the organization.”

Gokhale is a Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality and is also a certified Six Sigma Black Belt through the American Society for Quality, designations he earned through rigorous training in methodologies for leadership, organization-wide planning, systems improvement, team dynamics and management, analysis, and improvement measures. While the training is traditionally used in the manufacturing industry to manage and improve processes, flow, and production, he explained that these principles also apply to the healthcare field in terms of patient flow through the hospital, coordination of healthcare services provided among departments, and ensuring the highest quality of care throughout a patient’s experience.