Joan Brown

Adjunct Instructor

Joan Brown serves as the Associate Administrator of Care Transformation for the USC Healthcare System and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Clinical Surgery at the Keck School of Medicine. Prior to this role, she served as the Chief Data Officer for both the Department of Surgery in the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and the Critical Care Institute at Keck Medical Center. Dr. Brown was also the Administrative Director for Discovery-PREP, formally known as the U.S. Critical Illness and Injury Trials Group Program for Emergency Preparedness (USCIIT-PREP), which fosters investigator-initiated hypothesis testing and strategic planning at the national level for research public health emergencies. Her academic focus is on design and implementation of innovative and systematic processes that integrate robust engagement with data analytics, patient care, quality improvement and research.

Dr. Brown completed her undergraduate studies in biomedical engineering at Boston University and received her master’s in business administration from Boston College, Carrol School of Management. She is a Board-Certified Clinical Engineer (CCE) and obtained further training in global health delivery (GHD) at Harvard University’s Schools of Medicine and Public Health’s GHD Intensive program. She earned a Doctor of Education degree in organizational change and leadership at the Rossier School of Education of USC.

Dr. Brown has previously served as Director of Informatics at Massachusetts General Hospital where she partnered with Medical Directors and other leadership groups to incorporate data utilization and analytics across varied systems in the ICU setting for the improvement of strategic decision making on the part of ICU Executive and MGH Clinical Business Development committees. While at MGH, she also managed the facilitation of cutting-edge projects that included developing a systematic solution to combat clinical alarm fatigue, implementation of electronic record keeping in the Perioperative setting, designing the ICU of the Future, and re-engineering the patient care model and flow throughout all levels of the hospital setting.

Dr. Brown later worked as the Director of Telehealth and Program Technology at Orbis International where she continues to serve as a consultant to the Orbis senior management team today. While at Orbis, she formed and led a team in developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy for technology programs worldwide, including a groundbreaking education program that incorporated virtual surgical demonstration to build surgical capacity in low resource settings. She enhanced the organization’s goal of transforming lives by providing quality eye care, education, prevention and treatment services to the world’s most under-served areas via her revolutionary improvements to Orbis global telemedicine program, Cybersight.org, resulting in a 20% increase of the community globally. Throughout her tenure at Orbis, she leveraged a unique skills-set to foster infrastructure development, health systems strengthening, and telemedicine legislation in countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America & the Caribbean. She was awarded the 2014 International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) Eye Health Leaders Award for Innovation in Eye Health, commending the important work she brought to a global scale.

Contact Info:

Email: joan.brown@med.usc.edu