Meet Bala Hota

Bala Hota MD, MPH is a leading Chicago-based physician and the Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer for Rush University Medical Center (RUMC). As an Associate Chief Medical Officer, he oversees the use and integration of data analytics for quality improvement and has led the team at RUMC to integrate several technological advances into their patient care.

For example, Dr. Bala Hota has overseen the consolidation of RUMC’s reporting tools into the Epic EMR, which has driven the development of standard dashboards that display the top 250 metrics for executive leaders. He has also led the charge to incorporate “big data” technologies into the healthcare setting by leveraging Cloudera’s suite of products for a clinical data lake.

Dr. Bala Hota and the team at RUMC have also developed novel risk adjustment algorithms that link hospital inpatient quality, reimbursement, and outpatient health risk assessments to optimize risk adjustment in clinical care. Currently, Dr. Hota is developing novel machine learning methods for use in measuring the quality of care received by patients with the hope that this data will enhance a patient’s choice of healthcare setting.

Under Dr. Hota’s leadership, RUMC was the third site in the world to achieve the elite HIMSS level 7 AMAM certification. This certification indicates that Rush is operating with the highest level of analytics in a healthcare setting.

Dr. Bala Hota earned his medical degree from the University of Miami School of Medicine after earning a BS in biology from the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences. He completed his Categorical Internal Medicine Residency at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in 1999. He also holds a Masters in Public Health from the University of Illinois, which he earned in 2004.

Dr. Bala Hota has been a faculty member at RUMC since 2011 as a Professor of Medicine. He was honored in 2013 to receive the Quinton Young Award, which is given annually to a faculty member for exceptional contributions as a department leader, role model, and physician.

Among his many accomplishments, Dr. Hota has had 60 articles published in medical journals. These publications have covered numerous topics, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, how to properly measure healthcare quality, and methods to use computer algorithms to improve healthcare.