Dr. Caprice Greenberg named MCG Department of Surgery chair

Dr. Caprice C. Greenberg, a renowned health services researcher and surgical oncologist, has been named chair of the Department of Surgery at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

Greenberg, the Morgridge Distinguished Chair in Health Services Research in the Department of Surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, will join the medical school this spring. Pending approval by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents, she also will be named the Moretz/Mansberger Distinguished Chair in Surgery.

Her career focus has been using research to improve the quality and safety of surgical care. She has been at the forefront of the push to move surgical investigation, including video capture and analysis, into operating rooms to study the way care is delivered and to focus on system, team and individual provider performance.

“Dr. Greenberg is not only an outstanding surgical oncologist, with more than a decade of experience treating breast cancer patients, but is also a prolific health services researcher,” says MCG Dean Dr. David Hess. “Her research and innovative ideas are practical and have led to improvements in the quality of surgical care in Wisconsin and across the country. I’m excited to welcome her to MCG. I also want to thank Dr. Steve Holsten for graciously stepping up and expertly leading the department through this transition. I am grateful to him for his continued support and leadership.”

Greenberg helped develop the concept of surgical coaching, which is modeled after athletic coaching and encourages continuous professional development throughout one’s career to set action plans, achieve goals and optimize performance. She formed The Academy for Surgical Coaching, a nonprofit group working to disseminate that practice across the country.

She is the principal investigator on several multimillion dollar grants aimed at improving surgical education, training and outcomes, including a $2 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to train surgical oncologists; and a $2 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to develop a video-based collaborative learning program to help improve ventral hernia repairs.

Greenberg previously worked with the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology to help define the emerging field of Cancer Care Delivery Research (CCDR). She served on the NCI’s inaugural steering committee for CCDR, actively investigating how the health care system influences the care of cancer patients.

She developed the Surgical Collaborative of Wisconsin, a network of surgeons at three-quarters of the state’s hospitals, including all of the major health systems, who work together to create structured approaches to quality measurement and improvement.

Greenberg also created the Wisconsin Surgical Outcomes Research Program (WiSOR), a multi-investigator research program she directed until 2019. WiSOR was developed in 2011 to improve the quality, safety, effectiveness and efficiency of surgical care through research and innovation. When she joined the Department of Surgery faculty in 2011, there was no funding for health services research. Since then, nine faculty have obtained career development awards and seven faculty have been  independently funded for a total of $39 million in awards.

It is an effort she intends to replicate at MCG and across Georgia, Hess says.

She is past president of the Association for Academic Surgery and the Surgical Outcomes Club, a consortium of surgeons and scientists interested in advancing health services and outcomes research in surgery that she helped found. She serves on the editorial boards of Annals of Surgical Oncology and Annals of Surgery.

Greenberg earned her medical degree with honors from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and a master’s of public health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She completed a general surgery residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Fineberg Fellowship in surgical oncology at Dana-Farber/Mass General Brigham Cancer Center.