Adrienne Boissy MD, MA

Adrienne Boissy, MD, MA, is the Chief Experience Officer of Cleveland Clinic.  She is a staff physician at the Cleveland Clinic Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis and has a secondary appointment in Bioethics. Before moving into the Chief Experience Officer role, she served as the Medical Director of the Center of Excellence in Healthcare Communication. Her team has created a comprehensive program to strengthen physician and provider communication skills throughout Cleveland Clinic and has trained more than 4,000 staff physicians and house staff to date.
 
Dr. Boissy also guided the development of patient advisory councils across the Cleveland Clinic Health System and is active in the Cleveland Clinic Professionalism Council. She currently serves as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Patient Experience.

As part of her clinical work, Dr. Boissy focuses on ethical issues in neurological disease. She served on the Cleveland Clinic Ethics Committee and is the Assistant Clinical Director in the Center for Neuroethics. She has been published in Neurocritical Care, AAN Continuum and Neurology regarding the humane treatment of critically ill patients and communication challenges in clinical practice. In particular, she has a special interest in the words clinicians choose when conveying information, and the risks and ethics of what she calls “therapeutic mislabeling” versus truth telling.

Dr. Boissy was awarded a Sylvia Lawry Fellowship grant from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and an Arnold P. Gold Foundation grant for humanism in medicine. She also serves on the editorial board of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s Momentum Magazine.  Dr. Boissy also is a Harvard Macy scholar. She has spoken extensively around the country about the patient and provider experience and the impact of effective communication on both.
 
Dr. Boissy attended Boston University and worked in neurobiological research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. She completed her medical school training at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine and finished her neurology residency and neuroimmunology fellowship at Cleveland Clinic. She completed a master’s degree in bioethics from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.