A distinguished clinician and leader with more than 25 years of experience in our system, O’Neil A. Britton, MD, will take on expanded responsibilities and serve in a new role as chief integration officer and executive vice president of Mass General Brigham. He will lead our system integration activities as we advance toward our vision of becoming the integrated academic healthcare system of the future with patients at its center.
Dr. Britton, known as “OB” to colleagues and friends, has been instrumental in designing and executing our clinical integration strategy as senior vice president of Operations and associate chief operating officer since 2021. In his expanded role as chief integration officer, he will work with leaders and teams across our system to foster cross-system collaboration and advance our enterprise clinical services and service lines to better meet our patients’ needs.
“My experience has taught me that there is excellence everywhere you turn in our system,” Dr. Britton said. “We are just scratching the surface of our potential. There is so much opportunity, so much more to be gained by being unified and innovative in our work to improve the experiences of our patients and caregivers.”
Dr. Britton will oversee the continued integration of Mass General Brigham’s clinical services across three main areas: “ERAP departments” (Emergency Medicine, Radiology, Anesthesiology and Pathology) that each operate as a single systemwide enterprise clinical service; service lines that bring together multiple departments or disciplines to coordinate and simplify care around a whole series of disorders (ex: the Mass General Brigham Heart service line); and enterprise-wide services that can better support our patients through a high degree of coordination, such as our Behavioral and Mental Health, Pediatrics, Pharmacy, and Security programs.
“Dr. Britton is a highly regarded leader who has proven his ability to inspire teams and successfully manage complex, organization-wide change,” said Anne Klibanski, MD, president and CEO of Mass General Brigham. “With his experience as a clinician caring for patients and a leader at the hospital and system levels, he is ideally suited to lead Mass General Brigham through the next phases of our clinical integration.”
In addition to our integrated, systemwide services, Dr. Britton will manage multiple initiatives that are designed to improve access, expand capacity, and ensure our patients receive the right care, at the right time, in the right place. He will continue leading Enterprise Asset Management, our operations management system that optimizes patient access, capacity, and utilization across our system. He will partner with Jane Moran, Mass General Brigham’s chief information and digital officer, as co-executive sponsors of our Ambulatory Care Transformation work that is enhancing patient access to our ambulatory practitioners. He will oversee the operations of Healthcare at Home, including Hospital at Home, and Population Health Management, working closely with their respective leaders to optimize the performance of these programs. Dr. Britton also will be among the leaders from across the system who will develop recommendations for the future of Mass General Brigham cancer care.
“O’Neil is known and admired across our system. He has a well-earned reputation as a supportive, inclusive, and open-minded leader, who encourages creative thinking and new ideas,” said Ron Walls, MD, chief operating officer of Mass General Brigham. “It’s important to him that every member of the team is fully engaged in the focused pursuit of our shared mission.”
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Dr. Britton immigrated to New York as a teenager and attended City College of New York and Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. His connection to our system began with his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has since held numerous leadership positions that have given him deep knowledge and understanding of our system and its remarkable potential. After serving as chief medical officer and vice president of professional services at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, Dr. Britton was appointed chief health information officer for the system, a role in which he successfully led the systemwide Epic implementation, at its time the largest healthcare information technology project ever undertaken. Prior to his recent tenure as Mass General Brigham associate chief operating officer, he was chief medical officer and senior vice president at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Over the past 25 years, he has firmly established local roots, professionally and personally. He and his wife, Kathryn Britton, MD, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are proud to call Boston home and are raising two avid Boston sports fans.
“Our transformation as a system has to be a purposeful, collective effort,” Dr. Britton said. “There may be bumps in the road along the way, but we will course correct and move forward together.”
