Kavita Bhavan, M.D.

Biography

Kavita Bhavan, M.D., M.H.S., is Chief Innovation Officer for Parkland Health and Hospital System and a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a member of its Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine who serves as the Chief Innovation Officer for Parkland Health & Hospital System.

Dr. Bhavan earned her medical degree at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. She completed a residency in internal medicine at the Ochsner Clinic Foundation and received advanced training in infectious diseases through a fellowship at Washington University/Barnes-Jewish Hospital. She also holds a Master of Health Science degree in maternal and child health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

She joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 2009.

Dr. Bhavan’s research interests include reducing health disparities with a low-tech and low-cost patient-centered approach to innovation in care delivery, patient engagement, and self-care models. She developed a self-care program for uninsured patients discharged from Parkland Memorial Hospital’s safety net setting to self-administer outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (S-OPAT) for the treatment of a variety of infections. In this model, patients from a low-literacy or low-socioeconomic status population are taught to self-administer their intravenous (IV) antibiotics by gravity or IV push at home. Published data demonstrate efficacy with 47% lower 30-day readmission rates among patients in the self-care model compared to patients discharged with standard forms of OPAT. To date, more than 5,000 patients have been discharged to this program with significant improvement in resource utilization and patient satisfaction.

Her current research efforts include exploring other clinical settings for self-care models to improve health equity.

She is also focused on community-engaged initiatives to improve influenza vaccine uptake in vulnerable populations, and she is currently the principal investigator for the Dallas study site on a multicenter National Institutes of Health RAD- X UP study with the University of Chicago to improve COVID-19 testing among vulnerable populations.

Dr. Bhavan also serves as the Medical Director of the Outpatient Parenteral Antimicrobial Therapy Clinic and Infectious Diseases Ambulatory Clinics at Parkland Health & Hospital System. Since 2014, she has been an expert panel member on the IDSA Clinical Practice Guidelines for Outpatient Parenteral Antimicrobial Therapy for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

She is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine.

She has delivered countless invited lectures, published numerous academic articles, and contributed to the book Critical Care Infectious Diseases.

In 2019, she earned the UT Southwestern Program Development Award for Leadership in Clinical Excellence.