Suresh Pavuluri, MD, MPH

Dr. Suresh K. Pavuluri is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and Associate Director of Quality and Patient Safety for the Department of Emergency Medicine. He joined the Yale faculty in 2022. Prior to this, he completed his residency at The Mount Sinai Hospital. His interest in quality and safety grew from early experiences reviewing safety events and working closely with frontline clinicians and operational leaders to better understand how system design, communication patterns, and workflow pressures shape everyday patient care.

Dr. Pavuluri’s academic work focuses on practical, systems-based approaches to improving diagnostic safety and operational reliability in the emergency department. His research includes studies on diagnostic error detection using disease-specific look-back tools, conceptual models of diagnostic decision-making, and early-warning systems for identifying deterioration among ED boarders. He is steadily building a research portfolio supported by internal and external funding, including foundation and industry grants, and is developing expertise in mixed-methods research, measurement development, and safety science to support future independent investigation. Dr. Pavuluri's research has been published in BMJ Health Care Informatics, Academic Emergency Medicine, PLoS One, and The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. Nationally, he serves as a co-lead of ACEP’s Sepsis Emergency Quality Network, and his emerging work in quality and safety has been recognized through the ACEP Medical Directors Section Early Careerist Scholarship Award.

At Yale, Dr. Pavuluri partners with interdisciplinary teams to design and implement programs aimed at improving care quality, patient safety, and reducing healthcare costs. His initiatives include sepsis care reliability work, medication-safety checks for high-risk therapies, a same-day access program for heart-failure patients, and most recently, he partnered with colleagues with Smilow Cancer Center to help develop a new suspicion for cancer clinic to support timely outpatient evaluation. He also contributes to building educational and programmatic infrastructure for quality and safety within the department. He developed a Diagnostic Lecture Series that helps residents examine diagnostic misses through a systems-based lens and mentored several residents on quality improvement projects.