Anshu Abhat, MD

Anshu Abhat, MD, MPH is the Director of Patient Engagement at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (LA Health Services) and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

She is a practicing physician and educator in Internal Medicine in primary care and the inpatient hospital at Harbor-UCLA. She founded and runs an ambulatory procedure clinic focused on Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) for internal medicine resident trainees and attending physicians and teaches POCUS at national internal medicine conferences including at the American College of Physicians National Conferences (ACP).

At LA Health Services, she is the Director of Patient Engagement and Outreach for LA Health Services’ 500,000+ empaneled primary care patients across 4 hospitals and 25 multispecialty clinics. She leads system-wide patient engagement and outreach work on primary care quality, COVID testing and vaccination, patient access, and other topics.  She has launched new channels of engagement including a new Oracle Cerner patient portal mobile app, bidirectional text messaging, chatbots, etc. She also led major system wide improvement related to in-network transitions of care for LA Health Services’ patients.

She leads a team of 25+ staff including senior analysts, data experts, performance improvement leads, community health workers. She designed and launched a first of its kind Health Tech Navigator program of community health workers who assist language diverse patients in the LA Health Services safety net clinical sites to enroll in and use the patient portal to message their care teams, view their medical record, and access video visits and e-visits from home.  She has launched a new Patient Engagement Contact Center where community health workers assist patients remotely on how to use the patient portal, easily schedule flu shots, and more.

Dr. Abhat’s operational work and research focuses on the use of digital tools in safety net populations with particular interest in populations with limited English proficiency. She is interested in studying, developing, and implementing best practices to promote digital health equity.

Over the last decade, Dr. Abhat has become a national expert in digital health equity, patient engagement, and POCUS.

She currently leads and supports on projects to improve patient access, patient engagement, quality of care, digital health, lifestyle medicine, and food as medicine.