CHOC is thrilled to welcome Dr. Sandip Godambe as its senior vice president and chief medical officer (CMO).
In this role, Dr. Godambe has primary oversight of activities involving medical staff, quality, patient safety, regulatory affairs, and risk and accreditation. As part of this role, he oversees the clinical operations of CHOC’s two hospital campuses, ambulatory network and virtual health programs.
“CHOC already has many centers of excellence,” he says “Everyone is friendly and dynamic, and they all come to work to provide excellent care. I am excited to be a part of the CHOC team as we work to nurture, advance and protect the health and well-being of children.”
At CHOC, Dr. Godambe looks forward to providing opportunities for providers and staff to succeed and offer exceptional care to children. He’ll be teaching and leading programs, supporting CHOC’s innovation and research endeavors, working clinically in the emergency department and introducing system-wide improvement and safety science.
“The job of CMO will need to change with the changing health care landscape,” says Dr. Godambe. “Value-based care initiatives will require better integration of efforts within the hospital and ambulatory care arena with our community, state and national partners.”
Prior to joining CHOC in August, Dr. Godambe served as vice president, chief quality and safety officer at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters Health System in Virginia, where he was also a professor and vice chair of pediatrics and co-director for the improvement science fellowship for Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Dr. Godambe earned his MD-PhD degrees from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis Missouri; completed his residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Boston, Harvard Medical School; and secured a fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He later obtained his MBA with a healthcare quality focus from the University of Tennessee School of Business.
In addition, Dr. Godambe has been a senior examiner for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, which is jointly administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), American Society for Quality (ASQ), and the Department of Commerce. He is also an improvement advisor and fellow with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).
Active with American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), Children’s Hospital Association (CHA), and the Children’s Hospital Solutions for Patient Safety (CH-SPS), Dr. Godambe has written more than 50 publications/chapters in emergency medicine, quality, and immunology and is co-editor of five books.
With his vast experience in improvement and safety sciences, Dr. Godambe hopes to increase CHOC’s interconnectivity among all providers, associates and departments to co-design and co-produce healthcare with patients, families and communities and improve the efficiency of care and continue to deliver better outcomes.
“I want CHOC to be a learning system that better incorporates newly gathered information within our system and integrates it across the continuum to make us better,” says Dr. Godambe.
In his free time, Dr. Godambe enjoys cooking, running, cycling or playing the violin with his musically inclined wife and three children.
