Charles Macias

Chief Quality Officer

University Hospitals

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Charles Macias


Charles Macias, MD, MPH, is the Division Chief for Pediatric Emergency Medicine and Chief Quality Officer/Vice Chair of Quality for the University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s system of care. He is an associate professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University.

His interest in education has included leadership roles as the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship Director’s Committee Chairman, a former Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship Director at Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children’s Hospital, and liaison to the Residency Review Committee for pediatric emergency medicine.

Dr. Macias has published over 100 journal articles and several textbook chapters. He is also a co-editor of the textbook, Pediatric Emergency Medicine. His research endeavors have included close to $20 million dollars in federal research/program funding and several national research leadership positions. This includes former roles as chair of the Pediatric Emergency Medicine Collaborative Research Committee, founding and steering committee member of the Pediatric Emergency Research Network (global PEM research network) and HEDA PI for the Pediatric Emergency Care Research Network.

He is the co-director of one of the two national Pediatric Disaster Centers of Excellence (one based in Cleveland) funded by the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Dr. Macias has served as the Hospital Incident Command System commander for UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital and UH MacDonald Women’s Hospital during the COVID pandemic.

His focus on quality improvement and safety is evidenced in his national leadership roles. He is a co-chair of the Improving Pediatric Sepsis Outcomes quality improvement collaborative of the Children’s Hospital Association – a collaborative of over 54 institutions that has decreased mortality from pediatric sepsis nationally. He is the former chair and founding member of the Pediatric Septic Shock Collaborative of the AAP. He also serves as the executive director of the national Emergency Medical Services for Children Innovation and Improvement Center, utilizing improvement science to drive better outcomes across the emergency services continuum of care. The center was recently funded by a $10 million dollar federal grant to be led jointly out of offices here at Rainbow and at Dell Children’s in Austin, Texas.

He is past chair of the AAP’s Section on Emergency Medicine and most recently, he was elected to the newly created subspecialty seat on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest pediatric professional society with over 70,000 members.

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