Secretary Kate Walsh

A former hospital executive who has made equity in health care a centerpiece of her work, Kate Walsh has been serving as the state’s health and human services secretary since March 2023.

Walsh’s office oversees 11 agencies, two soldiers’ homes, the MassHealth system, and 23,000 employees whose work touches roughly one in three Massachusetts residents each day. The office has oversight for a wide range of state services, including child welfare, health benefits, veterans’ services, behavioral health, opioids response, and elder care.

Walsh previously served as CEO of the Boston Medical Center Health System for 13 years. She has also held senior leadership positions at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and several New York hospitals.

At Boston Medical Center, Walsh led a safety-net hospital and academic medical center that provides care to underserved populations in the region, while also overseeing the BMC WellSense Health Plan, which administers health insurance for low-income patients. In 2021, the hospital launched the Health Equity Accelerator to examine inequities in health care, studying dozens of health conditions to identify disparate outcomes by race and ethnicity and devising strategies to eliminate those gaps.

Under Walsh’s leadership, Boston Medical Center programs established partnerships focusing on behavioral health, affordable housing, job training, food insecurity, transportation, addiction services, and other issues affecting people’s health. In 2016, the hospital opened the first comprehensive transgender medical program in the Northeast.

A Yale University graduate with a master’s degree in public health, Walsh has served on numerous boards and commissions, including the Boston Public Health Commission, the American Hospital Association, and the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.