by Christina Echegaray
Eunice Huang, MD, MS, has joined Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt as associate surgeon-in-chief and chief surgical quality and innovations officer. She is also professor and vice chair of Clinical Services in the Department of Pediatric Surgery.
Huang was previously professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center School of Medicine as well as chief research biomedical informatics officer and surgeon at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital.
“Dr. Huang is a leading pediatric surgery authority in anorectal disease and informatics, and she is an emerging leader in surgical quality and outcomes. Dr. Huang will lead quality efforts for pediatric perioperative services,” said Jeffrey Upperman, MD, Surgeon-in-Chief for Children’s Hospital and chair of the Department of Pediatric Surgery.
Huang’s clinical interests include working with patients with congenital colorectal problems such as Hirschsprung’s disease and anorectal malformation, and she enjoys helping families manage each stage and developmental milestone of their children’s progress starting from birth. To achieve those milestones, she works with a care team comprised of different specialty areas and disciplines (gastroenterology, nutrition, neonatology, critical care, etc.) to meet the complex needs of those patients.
As part of her work, Huang focuses on streamlining and standardizing processes to ensure high-quality, cost-effective and efficient care is achieved to treat some of the most common pediatric conditions, including appendicitis, inguinal hernia and necrotizing enterocolitis.
Board-certified in clinical informatics, she works with engineers, software developers, informaticists and others to fine tune these processes to ensure quality care and increased patient satisfaction.
“I am really excited to be here. For me, I want to be able to meld my clinical informatics expertise, interest and background into how I deliver that care as a clinician. By using informatics tools, we can better streamline and standardize processes with the goal to optimize care,” said Huang. “And there is really no other institution that is a better place to do all this than Vanderbilt. This organization has a very long history of being at the forefront of the development of informatics as a science and also the implementation of that science into clinical care.”
Huang completed her undergraduate degree at Yale and went on to earn her medical degree from Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Following internship and residency in general surgery at the Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center, she did her fellowship in pediatric surgery at University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, where she remained for 14 years.
Huang is married to Raymond Gardocki, MD, who also recently joined Vanderbilt University Medical Center as an associate professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. They have three sons, Alex, 15, Timothy Joseph, 14, and Ryan, 12.
