Uma Kotagal is senior vice president for quality, safety and transformation and executive director of the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

As director of the Anderson Center, Dr. Kotagal oversees the development of disease management teams and development and institution of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines.

The primary purpose of the Anderson Center is to foster health services research and system transformation with the goal of improving the quality of healthcare delivery, translating knowledge into practice, and building the next generation of improvement leaders.

Dr. Kotagal was director of the neonatal intensive care units at the University Hospital and at Cincinnati Children’s for several years. While practicing, Dr. Kotagal recognized that care and outcomes improvement were a system property. She completed additional training, receiving her master’s of science in clinical epidemiology and clinical effectiveness from the Harvard School of Public Health, and refocused her clinical efforts on quality transformation at a systems level. She was also a visiting scholar at the Center for Risk Analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health and a visiting professor at the Tufts New England Medical Center, in the Division of Clinical Decision Making, completing further training in the field of decision and cost effectiveness analyses.

Dr. Kotagal has published extensively in the field of neonatal outcomes research, including studies on neonatal cost models, and early discharge of newborns. She published the first landmark paper on early discharge programs in the NICU setting.

Dr. Kotagal was born in Bombay, India, where she received her undergraduate and her MBBS from the University of Bombay. She did a rotating internship at the University of Bombay from 1970-1971 and another rotating internship at Detroit General Hospital from 1971-1972.

At Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Dr. Kotagal completed her pediatric residency from 1972-1974 and went on to do a fellowship in neonatology from 1974-1975. She completed a fellowship in neonatal physiology at the University of Cincinnati from 1975-1977.

Dr. Kotagal is a senior faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare. She also serves as chair of the quality steering team of the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association, as a member of the advisory committee of the Toronto Patient Safety Center, as an associate editor of BMJ Quality and Safety and as a member of the Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Kotagal is also a member of various local, regional and national committees in the area of child health.