September 15, 2015

 Jim O’Connell, President, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program

Jim O’Connell graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1970 and received his master’s degree in theology from Cambridge University in 1972. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1982, he completed a residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1985, O’Connell began full-time clinical work with homeless individuals as the founding physician of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which now serves more than 12,000 homeless persons each year in two hospital-based clinics (Boston Medical Center and MGH) and in more than 70 shelters and outreach sites in Boston. With his colleagues, O’Connell established the nation’s first medical respite program for homeless persons in September 1985, with 25 beds in the Lemuel Shattuck Shelter. This innovative program now provides acute and sub-acute, pre- and post-operative, and palliative and end-of-life care in BHCHP’s free-standing, 104-bed Barbara McInnis House. Working with the MGH Laboratory of Computer Science, O’Connell designed and implemented the nation’s first computerized medical record for a homeless program in 1995. From 1989 until 1996, O’Connell served as the national program director of the Homeless Families Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. O’Connell is the editor of The Health Care of Homeless Persons: A Manual of Communicable Diseases in Shelters and on the Streets. His articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Circulation, the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and several other medical journals. O’Connell has been featured on ABC’s “Nightline” and in a feature-length documentary titled “Give Me a Shot of Anything.” He has received numerous awards, including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award in 2012 and The Trustees’ Medal at the bicentennial celebration of MGH in 2011. O’Connell is president of BHCHP and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.