Paul Checchia, M.D., F.A.A.P., F.C.C.M., F.A.C.C., is Professor of Pediatrics and serves as Associate Division Chief for Cardiac Services and Business Operations of the Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. He specializes in critical care of children with heart disease. He has received several teaching awards, has authored several textbook chapters, serves on several editorial boards, and is a Senior Associate Editor of the journal Pediatric Critical Care Medicine and Associate Editor of the journal Critical Care Explorations. He was named Clinical Faculty of the Year for the Baylor College of Medicine in 2014 and received the Model for Leadership award from Baylor in 2017.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from Northwestern University with a BA in English. From there, he graduated from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in 1993. He performed his pediatric residency and pediatric critical care medicine fellowship at Children’s Memorial Hospital and Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, Illinois. Additionally, he served as a research fellow in the Feinberg Cardiovascular Research Institute of Northwestern University Medical School.
Dr. Checchia’s clinical research efforts focus on studies aimed at further understanding the complex pathophysiology of all forms of cardiac disease and related insults in children, with the goal of developing useful diagnostic tools, protective strategies, and mechanism driven cardiac therapies. Specifically, he investigates bypass related injury in children undergoing cardiac surgery for repair and palliation of complex congenital heart disease. Additionally, through his roles in charge of business development of the Heart Center, business operations for the Division, and Lead Physician Advisor to Revenue Cycle for the Hospital, he is positioning himself at the intersection of quality clinical care, efficiency of delivery models, and healthcare resource allocation.
Dr. Checchia has a passion for examining the human side of complex care models. Specifically, he focuses on the role of families, patients, and caregivers’ experiences in the technology driven environments of intensive care units. He has collaborated with the Rice University Medical Futures Lab and the Medical Humanities Program for over a decade and is now the Inaugural Clinical Fellow of the Medical Humanities Research Institute.