Vijay Kannan, MD

Vijay Kannan, MD, is the Director of the Office of Clinical Performance and Health Impact at IHS Headquarters. In this role he oversees the agency’s work on the monitoring and evaluation of clinical care, on academic affairs, on telehealth, and on credentialing and privileging. He previously worked as the Director of the Office of Quality Management for the Phoenix Area (Arizona, Utah, Nevada) IHS. His work there focused on identifying systemic issues in quality of care and addressing them in a context-relevant and data-driven manner. Prior to working for IHS he served as a Technical Officer at the World Health Organization (WHO) Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. He worked in the Clinical Services and Systems Unit, where he was the clinical focal point to the Quality Team and worked to develop emergency, surgical, and intensive care capacity in resource-limited settings as well to optimize the integration of care platforms across the care continuum. Before joining WHO, he served as faculty at Harvard Medical School, where his academic focus was on the use of registry-based analytics and applied implementation science methodology for quality improvement. He spent approximately one-third of his time in Africa as a consultant to WHO. He is an emergency physician by training, obtaining his Master’s in Public Health and fellowship in Global Health from the Harvard School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.