Dr. Mandel has been with Cincinnati Children’s during the quality and transformation journey over the past 10 years, and, in 2001, co-authored the grant proposal for Pursuing Perfection, the national quality improvement/transformation initiative launched by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He is leading the execution of multiple large-scale improvement initiatives at the regional, state, and national level, including an initiative to improve evidence-based care and outcomes for over 13,000 children with asthma across 40 community-based pediatric practices in the PHO network, representing 40% of the region’s pediatric asthma population; this initiative is also designed to build improvement capability and redesign care delivery within primary care practices, thus supporting sustainable systems for ongoing improvement. To support the business case for quality, he led the design and successful negotiation of a provider-driven asthma pay-for-performance program with the region’s largest commercial payor, with innovative design characteristics that accelerated large-scale improvement—this represents the only published evidence for linking incentives to performance on population-based quality measures aggregated across provider sites. Recent recognition of the PHO asthma improvement initiative includes being selected by the American Academy of Pediatrics for a national spread campaign, and the PHO web-based asthma registry being designated a “best practice” by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, with a case study published in “Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User’s Guide (2nd edition).”

Additional responsibilities at Cincinnati Children’s include co-leading the Business Case for Quality Team which assesses the financial impact of quality improvement initiatives; co-leading the Ratings and Rankings Team which addresses public reporting of national quality measures, transparency of quality measures, quality surveys, and quality awards; and, co-leading the external quality improvement consulting enterprise. Dr. Mandel also serves as a faculty member for quality improvement training and education programs, as well as the quality scholars/health services research fellowship program at Cincinnati Children’s.

Dr. Mandel is a consultant to the American Board of Pediatrics on the strategy for linking quality improvement to maintenance of board certification; improvement advisor for the American Academy of Pediatrics’ national initiative to build improvement capability among state chapters (initial focus on asthma); improvement advisor for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Aligning Forces for Quality and Improving Performance in Practice initiatives; and serves on the Ohio Department of Health-Hospital Measures Advisory Council, representing children's hospitals across Ohio relative to public reporting and transparency of hospital quality measures.

Dr. Mandel is a peer reviewer for JAMA, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Quality and Safety in Health Care, and American Journal of Managed Care.

Dr. Mandel has been an invited speaker on quality improvement, pay-for-performance, and public reporting at national meetings of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Initiative for Children’s Healthcare Quality, National Managed Health Care Congress, National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions, and Child Health Corporation of America.

Prior to joining Cincinnati Children’s, Dr. Mandel was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar in health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. Mandel completed his pediatric residency at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, where he was also Pediatric Chief Resident. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Duke University and an M.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He completed the Executive Program in Health Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and The Business of Medicine Executive Program jointly offered by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins University School of Continuing Studies, Division of Business and Management.

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