GI Grand Rounds - "Tools for Quality Improvement & Patient Safety"

Sujatha Sankaran will present "Tools for Quality Improvement & Patient Safety". Dr. Sankaran is an Associate Professor of Medicine with the Division of Hospital Medicine. She received her medical degree from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and subsequently completed her training in Internal Medicine at the Georgetown University/Washington Hospital Center program in June 2005. She then worked as an Academic Hospitalist at Columbia University in New York City, where she was actively involved in resident education. Subsequently, Sujatha volunteered in sub–Saharan Africa.

After returning from Africa, Sujatha switched to primarily providing outpatient medical practice for five years before joining the Division of Hospital Medicine as an Assistant Clinical Professor. During this time, Sujatha started a non-governmental organization aimed at training health workers in the developing world to prevent chronic cardiovascular disease. Her current career interest involves providing high quality and safe care to patients in under-resourced regions, both domestically and globally.

In 2015, Sujatha was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study mechanisms for cardiovascular disease management in under-resourced areas of Southern India. As part of her Fulbright, she partnered with a local rural health site to create a community health worker hypertension program and helped develop strategies for quality improvement in rural and urban settings with a large burden on chronic diseases. Sujatha has worked on tobacco policy in India and was formerly the Medical Director for Smoking Cessation at Moffitt-Long Hospital and the Physician Champion for Smoking Cessation at UCSF Moffitt Long Hospital. Sujatha is currently the medical director for inpatient substance use at UCSF Health. In this role, she is spearheading efforts to build an inpatient substance use management program and chairs the Substance Use Committee.

Since 2018, Sujatha has been the director of the quality and safety program for the Department of Neurosurgery. In this role, she leads a number of quality improvement projects for the department, delivers a quality improvement curriculum to the neurosurgery residents, leads efforts to improve patient safety through the incident reporting and M&M systems, sits on the Neuro unit-based leadership team, and acts as a representative of the neurosurgery department in institution-wide efforts to improve quality of neurosurgical care.