Dr. Kavita Babu is a quadruple threat, said Dr. Eric Dickson, president and CEO of UMass Memorial Health in Worcester.
Dickson has known Babu for 15 years and can confirm she is 1) a great doctor, 2) a great educator, 3) a great researcher, and 4) an ardent community advocate.
“I think about the positive mark that that woman has already left and what she’ll do in the future, and I’m humbled,” Dickson said.
She’s been a practicing emergency medicine physician for 25 years, and today holds so many titles she finds it simplest to just go by medical director of community benefits for UMass Memorial Health. Yet, that title doesn’t begin to scratch the surface.
In her role, Babu is the founder of the healthcare system’s Road to Care, a mobile clinic traveling throughout Worcester and offering free medical care to people with housing and food insecurity, as well as substance use disorders.
She is co-director of UMass Memorial Medical Center’s Medical Respite program, a joint venture with the Framingham’s South Middlesex Opportunity Council, providing a safe space to recover post-acute care for unhoused individuals while supporting their transition to permanent and stable housing
What started as a seven-bed pilot initiative in 2024, launched in part by a $820,000 state grant Babu secured, is now a permanent 11-bed program that has successfully transitioned 12 individuals into permanent housing. This is one of her proudest accomplishments.
The feat is in alignment with the directive Dickson gave her when he named her UMass Memorial’s inaugural chief opioid officer: to decrease the harms of opioids, including morbidity and mortality.
“There’s so much that we don’t even realize are that underpins our health, with the most foundational being housing,” said Babu.
Babu spearheaded these initiatives, and she manages their finances, writes and secures grants, oversees contracting, insurance agreements, and billing along with being responsible for project management and operational logistics.
“Each one of these things, it starts with that iterative process of identifying the problem, exploring the solutions, deploying the solutions, improving on them,” said Babu. “That operational piece is what takes this from idealism to action.”
Babu’s unique capacity to make a business case for an intervention is one of the reasons Dickson later selected her for her directorial role in community benefits.
Everyday, medical professionals are coming to UMass Memorial looking for resources for their initiatives, but most of them can’t put together a true value proposition for him, said Dickson.
Babu does.
She creates a value proposition of why it is financially worthwhile to invest in programs such as her Road to Care and Medical Respite program, which in the end save the community money, he said.
“The Road to Care treatment center that in the end, for a few hundred thousand dollars a year, she’s going to prevent dozens, if not hundreds of opioid overdoses, which would have cost millions of dollars a year,” he said.
Babu has the complementary strengths of not only being a highly-skilled business woman but having a close to unparalleled ability to provide care with humility and compassion for each patient.
“Think about that: walking into a room and … interacting with a person you’ve never met before, and giving them the worst news of their life. And then worry about getting back to work so you can see the next patient,” said Dickson.
Dealing with those situations day in and day out often hardens physicians, he said, but Babu has never been able to just get up and mentally walk away from these tragedies.
“She just felt like this was a failure of all of medicine for not having prevented this from happening, and a lot of my other colleagues just move on,” he said. “This is her thing, is opioid overdoses. And she works relentlessly, like it’s personal for her.”
This grief is the hardest part of her job, said Babu. But the undefeated optimism of her colleagues is what helps sustain her, including wise words Dickson himself shared with her.
“Every day something amazing happens, and every day something hard happens,” Babu said. “It’s that balance of these incredible success stories that sort of propel you forward, and then these tragedies that propel you faster.”
Mica Kanner-Mascolo is a staff writer at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the healthcare and diversity, equity, and inclusion industries.
