UC San Diego Health has handed the keys to its tech future to one of its own, naming Alexander Khalessi, MD, MBA, as chief innovation officer and interim assistant vice chancellor for Health Sciences Innovation and AI. The move drops a nationally recognized neurosurgeon into the middle of the health system’s push to roll out new technology and weave artificial intelligence into everyday patient care.
According to UC San Diego Health, Khalessi will steer systemwide tech deployment, oversee surgical and procedural innovation, and line up capital and operational priorities behind digital transformation and AI readiness. Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla said Khalessi’s background gives UC San Diego an edge as it works to plug AI and digital tools into clinical workflows in ways that actually help patients instead of just creating more buzz.
Khalessi is a professor of neurological surgery, radiology and neurosciences and chairs UC San Diego’s Department of Neurological Surgery, according to the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He has held national leadership roles and built up a substantial record of peer reviewed publications and academic service.
In its announcement, UC San Diego Health highlighted that Khalessi has authored more than 150 peer reviewed papers, served as principal or co investigator on more than 25 clinical trials, and holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, Stanford University and MIT Sloan. The system also credited him with helping grow a subspecialty neurosurgery program that now performs more than 4,500 major procedures each year, and noted his pledge to accelerate “the safe and thoughtful use of AI” for patients’ benefit.
What He'll Do
In the innovation chief role, Khalessi will act as the traffic cop and champion for new tools, coordinating clinicians, information services and innovation teams to test, validate and scale technologies across UC San Diego’s hospitals and clinics. He will work closely with the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation, which is building infrastructure, including a Mission Control Center concept, to trial AI driven tools and move successful pilots into routine care, according to the Jacobs Center for Health Innovation.
UCSD's AI Groundwork
UC San Diego is not starting from zero. The system has already tested generative AI in clinical workflows, including a randomized quality improvement study published in JAMA Network Open that looked at AI drafted replies inside the Epic electronic health record. Those messages turned out to be longer and more empathetic, but they did not shorten overall reply time for clinicians. The upside for Khalessi is that he inherits real data and operational lessons, not just slide decks.
Why It Matters
Hospitals and health systems across the country are minting C suite titles built around digital transformation and AI, and Khalessi’s appointment puts UC San Diego in that club, as noted by Becker's Hospital Review. The harder part will be turning one off pilots into tools that doctors and nurses can rely on every day, ideally cutting their workload and improving outcomes without piling on new risks.
Khalessi will juggle his new enterprise level responsibilities with ongoing clinical leadership, a combination health systems often favor when they want innovation efforts to have credibility in the operating room as well as in the boardroom. In the coming months, UC San Diego Health is expected to roll out details on specific pilots, big ticket investments and the governance structures that will shape how AI is deployed across the system.
