Richa Gupta became senior vice president and chief operating officer of RUSH University Group (RUMG) in May 2019. RUMG is a multidisciplinary group of more than 800 physicians and advanced practice providers employed by RUSH University Medical Center, who provide care in more than 80 practice sites across the Chicago area. Gupta oversees RUMG’s daily operations and works with RUMG leaders to position RUSH as one of the nation’s top-performing academic medical centers.
In February 2020, Gupta was asked by Dr. Omar Lateef, president and chief executive officer of RUSH University Medical Center, to lead the Medical Center’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the spring, she and a team of leaders guided the Medical Center through a surge of patients that now totals more than 2,000 people, equipping staff with the resources, education and space needed to safely care for patients. This successful response, which includes outcomes for intensive care unit patients with COVID-19 that were far better than national averages, has garnered the Medical Center national recognition as one of the hospitals in the country most prepared for the pandemic.
Gupta also has advanced the Medical Center’s quality rankings by focusing on efforts related to reducing avoidable patient harm and improving efficiency of care. In 2022, the health care services company Vizient ranked the Medical Center No. 3 among the nation’s academic medical centers for quality and accountability.
In the spring of 2019, she led the Medical Center through a highly successful survey by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the first in 19 years.
Prior to her current role, Gupta was RUMG’s vice president of clinical operations. She collaborated with clinical and operational leaders on improvement in the areas of patient experience, provider experience and access.
She previously was RUSH University Medical Center’s vice president of performance improvement and operational effectiveness from 2016
to 2018. Her team developed a system-wide use of a daily management system. Notable quality improvements were seen in radiology, emergency department and urology clinic.
From 2015 to 2016, Gupta was the Medical Center’s chief quality officer. In this position, she was responsible for building a culture of quality and safety by integrating Lean processes into all elements of improvement, patient experience, and clinical and operational quality.
Gupta began her career at the Medical Center in 2011 as the associate vice president of performance improvement and clinical effectiveness. She was tasked with launching a performance improvement program using Lean Six Sigma improvement skills to lead multidisciplinary projects across the organization.
Prior to joining RUSH, Gupta worked at Northwestern Medicine for nearly eight years. She was hired as a performance improvement consultant and spent her last four years there as a surgical services director, managing budget development, deployment and improvement initiatives around surgical scheduling, supply expense reduction and financial management.
In 2017, Gupta was selected for the inaugural class of Carol Emmott Fellows, which prepares women for senior management roles in health care and empowers them to drive change and gender equity at their organizations. She is also the recipient of the 2019 Larry Goodman Leadership Award, named for the former CEO of the Medical Center and RUSH, which recognized her work in health care improvement and leadership of the 2019 CMS survey. She was on the board of CommunityHealth, an organization dedicated to serving the uninsured and underserved in Chicago and its surrounding communities.
Gupta graduated from Bombay University’s T.N. Medical College in Mumbai, India, and received a Master of Health Services Administration from the University of Michigan.