Thea James, MD, MPH
Thea James, MD, MPH
Vice President of Mission
Boston Medical Center Health System
As Vice President of Mission, Dr. James works with caregivers throughout BMC. Additionally, she has primary responsibility for coordinating and maximizing BMC’s relationships and strategic alliances with a wide range of local, state and national multi-sector organizations including community agencies, housing advocates, and others that partner with BMC. The goal is to foster innovative and effective new models of care that are essential for patients and communities to thrive and reach full potential. This includes focus on the intersections of health and wealth, economic mobility and other upstream drivers of predictable poor health outcomes. These care models are critical to operationalizing equity in the broadest sense.
In 2020-2021, Dr. James served on the Mayor’s Health Inequities Task Force for the City of Boston, to provide guidance on addressing inequities associated with the pandemic. She also served on the Massachusetts Department of Public Health COVID-19 Health Equity Advisory Group. Dr. James served on Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine 2009-2012, where she served as chair of the Licensing Committee. She is Director of the Violence Intervention Advocacy Program at BMC and a founding member of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. In 2011, she was appointed to Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence.
Dr. James’ passion is Public Health both domestically and globally. For several years, she and colleagues worked with local partners in Haiti, and Africa, to implement sustainable healthcare models and ultrasound training. As a member of Equal Health, she was a visiting professor for the first class of Emergency Medicine residents in Haiti at Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais and at St. Boniface Hospital in Fond des Blancs.
Dr. James served as a Supervising Medical Officer on the Boston Disaster Medical Assistance Team (MA-1 DMAT), under the Department of Health and Human Services. She has deployed to post 9/11 in NYC, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, Bam, Iran after the 2003 earthquake, and Port-Au-Prince Haiti after the earthquake of 2010. Dr. James traveled to Haiti with MA-1 DMAT one day after the 2010 earthquake.
She is a 2008 awardee of Boston Public Health Commission’s Mulligan Award for public service, and a 2012 recipient of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Role Model Award. She received The Boston Business Journal Healthcare Hero award in 2012 & 2015. She was a 2014 recipient of the Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Award. The Boston Chamber of Commerce awarded Dr. James with the Pinnacle Award in 2015, which honors women in business and the professions. She was a 2019 Massachusetts Public Health Association Health Equity Champion. In 2020, Dr. James received the American College of Emergency Medicine Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, The History Project presented her with a History Maker Award.
A graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine, James trained in Emergency Medicine at Boston City Hospital, where she was a chief resident.