Sajjad Yacoob

sajjad-yacoob

Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics
Assistant Dean, Student Affairs, Keck School of Medicine
Assistant Dean for Technology and Innovation Keck School of Medicine
Chief Medical Information Officer, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Born in India and raised in Southern California, Dr. Sajjad A. Yacoob received his bachelors of science in biology from UCLA where he graduated cum laude with departmental highest honors in 1985. He went to the East Coast when he was accepted to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx New York in 1987. He graduated from there in 1991 with his medical degree. He came back to LA where he completed his internship and residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles from 1991 to 1994. He subsequently was chosen as one of the 2 CHLA chief residents in 1994-1995. He continued his work at CHLA as an attending physician in the division of General Pediatrics starting in 1995. He has ward attending responsibility is on inpatients and maintains an active outpatient practice at the AltaMed Health Services clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Dr. Yacoob was the pediatrics clerkship for the Keck school of Medicine of USC from 1997 to 2012. Since July 2011 he has served as Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at the USC Keck School of Medicine where his duties include career guidance and student counseling. He is actively involved in Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ pediatric residency program, RN residency education, and hospital wide patient safety and quality initiatives. Dr. Yacoob is actively involved with and sits on numerous hospital and medical staff committees. He chairs the hospital’s Medical Records Committee and the Clinical Information Technology Portfolio Committee. His interests include child safety, medical informatics, medical education and quality improvement/patient safety/patient satisfaction.

He has been recognized for his involvement in education, teaching and clinical care with numerous awards including:

Dr. Yacoob has been the chief medical information officer at CHLA since 2007. He was the physician champion for the KIDS (Knowledge, Information and Decision Support) clinical information system at CHLA. His involvement as physician champion for the KIDS system, a comprehensive electronic medical record, included visioning and design of the system as well as facilitating house wide adoption. He was instrumental in the implementation of KIDS in 2004 and continued as a vital champion by improving and enhancing its use in clinical care. He guided the hospitals EMR to a HIMSS level stage 6 for both acute and ambulatory. He also headed up the hospitals effort to expand EMR into the amatory clinics as he co-chaired the CHLA ambulatory EHR committee and has successfully guided the team’s full implementation of the ambulatory EMR record.

Dr. Yacoob was recently named as Assistant Dean for Innovation and Technology and is currently heading up the Keck School of Medicine’s effort to improve the quality of medical education by establishing the Center for Innovation in Medical Education and Technology. He has been an invited speaker nationally and internationally on the topics of information technology, patient safety and quality care, physician adoption, medical education, and future visioning of digital technology in healthcare.