Dr. Rafi began his career working across a variety of non-profit, higher education, and small business sectors. He accepted progressively challenging roles as a Health Communications Specialist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an Enterprise Analytics Manager with the Library of Congress (LOC), and as an Assistant Dean of Health Information Technology with the College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University (FAU).
Following those roles, Dr. Rafi most recently worked as Assistant Dean of Technology Services for the School of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where he was responsible for optimal alignment of University and Hospital IT services across the Health Sciences Schools, Centers and Institutes. These IT domains and teams included information security, compliance, governance, clinical systems, research computing, business intelligence, project management, audiovisual and classroom instructional delivery, desktop and mobile support.
During his time at VCU, he curated, organized, and championed a robust new portfolio of IT products and services, most notably an inaugural research computing center, services and environments to serve VCU’s biomedical, clinical, health, life and data science research faculty.
Dr. Rafi earned his Ph.D. in public policy and administration from VCU with a research focus on Academic Health Science Centers and the role of digital health technology policy in addressing health disparities via social determinants of health. Specifically, his research centers on the intervening role of the electronic health record (EHR) used by Academic Health Science Center institutions to capture social determinants of health data and how they have leveraged that data to advance health equity and policy for medically underserved areas/populations.
In his new role, he will be providing strategic guidance and operational support for the effective use of Information Technology in the School of Medicine, Yale Medicine, School of Nursing, School of Public Health, and Yale Health. Dr. Rafi and HSIS will be responsible for establishing and nurturing trusted relationships with colleagues in delivering comprehensive IT systems, services, and support throughout the Yale Health and Sciences ecosystem while meeting the complex and unique information services needs for each division.
Read more about Dr. Rafi in the It’s Your Yale article, New ACIO for Health Sciences.
