SreyRam Kuy
SreyRam Kuy is a Cambodian American surgeon, writer, researcher, and healthcare executive.
Early life
SreyRam Kuy was two years old when she and her family escaped Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields. She along with her mother and sister were severely injured during a bombing in a border refugee camp in Thailand, and treated for wounds by a Red Cross volunteer surgeon, which inspired her to later become the first female Cambodian refugee to work as a surgeon in the United States. In 1981, she and her mother and sister moved to the United States.Education
Dr. Kuy obtained her B.S. degree in Philosophy and B.S. degree in Microbiology from Oregon State University, then completed her M.D. degree from Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. She completed her residency in general surgery at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio and the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. She completed her master's degree at the Yale School of Medicine as a fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and the Brandeis leadership program for health policy and management at the Heller School for Policy and Management.Career
From 2014 to 2016 SreyRam Kuy worked at the Overton Brooks Veterans Affairs Medical Center as Director of the Center for Innovations in Quality, Outcomes and Patient Safety and Assistant Chief of the General Surgery Section, where she led efforts to decrease surgical mortality, improve healthcare quality and increase access to care for veterans.Dr. Kuy served from 2016 to 2017 as Chief Medical Officer for Medicaid for the state of Louisiana. During this period, she led efforts tackling the opioid epidemic in Louisiana, including enacting Medicaid policies to align opioid prescribing to CDC guidelines, resulting in a 40% reduction in opioid prescriptions among Louisiana Medicaid patients.
In 2017, Dr. Kuy was appointed associate chief of staff at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston. From 2017-2018, Kuy served as Special Advisor to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs under both David Shulkin and Peter O'Rourke. In 2018 Dr. Kuy became the first woman appointed Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Community Care. Dr. Kuy currently cares for veterans as a surgeon at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Dr. Kuy taught as an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Louisiana State University - Shreveport, then Associate Professor of Surgery at Louisiana State University - New Orleans, and later joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine.
Dr. Kuy has published contributions in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Independent, Salon, Washington Post and Huffington Post. She has also published extensively on healthcare quality, patient safety and health policy in medical journals and is the author of the surgical textbook "50 Studies Every Surgeon Should Know", published by Oxford University Press.