Dr. Lee Sanders is a general pediatrician and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Stanford University, where he is Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics. He holds a joint appointment in the Center for Health Policy, where he is a co-director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention (CPOP).
An author of numerous peer-reviewed articles addressing child health disparities, Dr. Sanders is a nationally recognized scholar in the fields of health literacy and child chronic-illness care. Dr. Sanders was named a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar for his leadership on the role of maternal health literacy and English-language proficiency in addressing child health disparities. Aiming to make the US health system more navigable for the one in 4 families with limited health literacy, he has served as an advisor to the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Academic Pediatric Association, and the American Cancer Society. Dr. Sanders leads a multi-disciplinary CPOP research team that provides analytic guidance to national and state policies affecting children with complex chronic illness – with a focus on the special health-system requirements that arise from the unique epidemiology, care-use patterns, and health-care costs for this population. He leads another CPOP/PCOR-based research team that applies family-centered approaches to new technologies that aim to improve care coordination for children with medical complexity. Dr. Sanders is also principal investigator on two NIH-funded studies that address health literacy in the pediatric context: one aims to assess the efficacy of a low-literacy, early-childhood intervention designed to prevent early childhood obesity; the other aims to provide the FDA with guidance on improved labeling of pediatric liquid medication. Research settings for this work include state and regional health departments, primary-care and subspecialty-care clinics, community-health centers, WIC offices, federally subsidized child-care centers, and family advocacy centers.