President and Chief Operating Officer of Kent Hospital, HARI Board of Trustees

Paari Gopalakrishnan, MD, MBA, is President and COO of Kent Hospital in Warwick, Rhode Island.

Dr. Gopalakrishnan has extensive and varied experience in the healthcare industry. Before being appointed president and COO of Kent Hospital in April of 2022, Dr. Gopalakrishnan had been serving as Chief Medical Officer (CMO) since 2018. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he assumed operational oversight for the Kent Field Hospital, a critical role for Care New England, during the global crisis. As health care systems around the world struggled to deal with an unprecedented influx of patients, the field hospital expanded Kent’s capacity to care for patients of the community allowing continued access to care for patients with all diagnoses. This, coupled with the ongoing stressors throughout the pandemic that all healthcare institutions faced, proved once again that he could manage many streams of highly impactful and important work, simultaneously.

Dr. Gopalakrishnan has championed a commitment to the development of a collaborative multidisciplinary framework across the Kent service lines that prove foundational to excellent patient care. Improvements in Kent’s quality - Leapfrog and CMS Stars metrics - reflect an independent, data-driven validation of Kent’s commitment to ensuring evidence-based structures, processes, and practices dedicated to the achievement of excellent patient outcomes. Dr. Gopalakrishnan has worked tirelessly, along with so many others, to achieve the best possible patient care and outcomes.

Prior to assuming his position at Kent Hospital, Dr. Gopalakrishnan served as Chief of the Division of Hospitalist Medicine at Greenville Health System in Greenville, South Carolina. He was also appointed a clinical assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s School of Medicine.

As a senior leader in a diverse, multi-hospital system he championed a rapidly growing division of roughly 100 physicians encompassing acute-care hospitalist medicine, post-acute care medicine, and inpatient psychiatry.

He received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University, a medical degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and completed his internal medicine residency at Brown University. He received his MBA with honors from Bryant University.

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