Getting to Know the Chief Medical Officer at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health

Mitchell Cohen, MD, has shaped his career in pediatrics around a vision of doing what’s right for young patients and their families.

Dr. Cohen became the newest chief medical officer at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford when he arrived in January, taking over from Dennis Lund, MD, who had held the post since 2015. He now leads the medical staff at the hospital and throughout the Stanford Medicine Children’s Health network.

After two decades of leadership roles in academic pediatrics, when he sought his next challenge, Dr. Cohen said Stanford Medicine had several characteristics that made it a natural choice: “What convinced me that I wanted to come?” he said. “It was, easily, the people and the hunger to be preeminent.”

Dr. Cohen established himself in the 1980s and ’90s as a physician-scientist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where he led the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition for nine years. In 2014, he moved to the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine to serve as chair of its Department of Pediatrics and physician in chief at Children’s of Alabama.

But his journey as an advocate for children began much earlier, when he was a pediatric resident contemplating how to pursue his scientific interest in preventing infectious diarrhea, which is a leading cause of child malnutrition and deaths worldwide.

“I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to look at it from the host’s perspective and become a pediatric gastroenterologist, or from the bug’s perspective and become an infectious disease doc,” Dr. Cohen said. “I ended up being a gastroenterologist.”

In other words—in a theme that would echo throughout his career—he chose the kids.

Pediatricians as advocates

Dr. Cohen’s research as a gastroenterologist contributed to development of vaccines for E. coli and diarrheal diseases that are intended for use in children in developing countries.

“After doing that, I still love it, but I realized there could be more impact in a broader opportunity,” he said. That fueled his interest in leadership roles.

One way that Dr. Cohen has pushed for broad impact is by helping his fellow pediatricians to become good advocates for their patients.

“Even in our era of diminishing trust in medicine, I still think that pediatricians have the trust of most families and policy makers,” he said. “Obviously, most of our patients don’t vote, so somebody has to give voice to their needs. That falls to us. I think it’s a noble cause.”

In the service of that cause, it’s important to think through the best ways to engage people outside academia to help them understand what children need, he added.

“In academic medicine, we try to be data-driven in our decisions, but when we’re talking to real people and policy makers, stories are sometimes more important,” he said. “It’s a ‘yes, and’ experience: Tell the story and have the data. But probably don’t lead with the data; it doesn’t play as well. People learn from experience and stories, not PowerPoints.”

An evolving medical frontier

Thinking about the ever-evolving needs of growing kids and their families comes naturally to Dr. Cohen. He’s the sort of person who, if you tell him that your oldest child is about to turn 15, responds with a solemn-yet-merry “Congratulations … and I’m sorry!”

Perhaps this isn’t surprising; Dr. Cohen and his wife, Morissa Ladinsky, MD, who has joined Stanford Medicine as a clinical professor of pediatrics, have five now-adult children. The two also share an academic interest in the needs of young adults who are moving from pediatric care to adult medicine.

Young people living with chronic disease are especially vulnerable during the shift out of pediatric care, Dr. Cohen said. Their ranks are growing, thanks to medical breakthroughs that now enable kids who would once have died in childhood to live long lives. Certain diagnoses—such as cystic fibrosis, congenital heart defects, and complications of premature birth—that would once have been seen only in pediatrics are now in the province of adult medicine.

“We need to work with our colleagues at Stanford Health Care to provide primary care, as well as the subspecialty expertise to take care of these patients as they age past pediatrics and also experience the illnesses of adulthood,” he said. “It’s layering the complications of chronic pediatric illness on top of normal adult illnesses; that interface is evolving, and we need to make sure those patients get the care they need.”

Prioritizing what’s right for patients

Several of the most gratifying experiences of Dr. Cohen’s career have come from building multidisciplinary teams, “seeing them coalesce in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and then getting out of their way,” he said.

Dr. Cohen also derives satisfaction from helping his teams resolve moral-compass issues, he said, noting that he aims to ensure that institutional bureaucracy does not get in the way of meeting patients’ needs.

“There have been a number of times when I have said, ‘Wait a second, we have to do this.’” For example, in Dr. Cohen’s prior role, a primary care clinic needed a social worker to assist patients and families. At first, leaders from different parts of the academic and clinical infrastructure each said they couldn’t afford to fund the role.

“We kept bringing it up, going round and round,” Dr. Cohen said. “Eventually, I realized it didn’t matter whose responsibility it was. This was critical to meeting patients’ needs. So we said, as a department, this was something we could do: We could right a wrong.”

As Dr. Cohen begins his leadership role, he’ll be holding on to his core values, while also familiarizing himself with the new job and the people whose goal of preeminence attracted him to Stanford Medicine in the first place.

“What I’m looking forward to is really enjoying the opportunity to listen carefully to very bright people and learn from them,” he said. “I want people to know that our North Star is doing what’s right for patients and families, and I want to empower our medical staff to advance their really good ideas in support of that goal.”