At Los Angeles-based UCLA Health, growth in digestive disease care is not being defined by a single building, a single campus or even a single specialty. It is being shaped by a broader idea: that academic medicine works best when it reaches beyond its own walls.
That philosophy is central to how Eric Esrailian, MD, leads one of the nation’s most prominent digestive disease programs. As chief of UCLA’s Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases, Dr. Esrailian is helping guide a program that sits inside a major public research university, an integrated health system and one of the most dynamic metropolitan regions in the country.
For Dr. Esrailian, that setting is not incidental. It is the strategy.
“I’m very proud of UCLA being a top research university, but also a public university,” he said. “Being a public university, having a medical school and having an integrated health system in a major metropolitan city sets UCLA apart in many different ways.”
That vantage point has shaped how he thinks about leadership. Rather than operating as a standalone division pursuing its own priorities in isolation, gastroenterology at UCLA is positioned as part of a much larger institutional and civic ecosystem, one that includes health sciences, arts, athletics, architecture and the wider Los Angeles community.
“As a division of a department of medicine, as part of a school of medicine, we don’t try to do things on our own,” Dr. Esrailian said. “We feel like we’re part of a bigger team.”
Building beyond the main campus
One of the clearest priorities driving the division is geographic reach. For years, academic medicine has wrestled with how to extend highly specialized care beyond flagship campuses. At UCLA, Dr. Esrailian said, that challenge has become a defining focus.
“We have a goal to serve the community, and Los Angeles continues to grow,” he said. “It’s important for us not to remain an ivory tower on the main campus, but to meet patients where they are as much as possible.”
That approach has helped shape UCLA Health’s expansion across greater Los Angeles, with strategic outpatient and hospital locations designed to make high-level GI care more accessible. The idea is not to replace the academic medical center, but to ensure it is no longer the only point of entry.
“I made the comment about the ivory tower not because we don’t need the ivory tower,” Dr. Esrailian said. “You just can’t be exclusive to the ivory tower.”
Quaternary care, transplant services and major surgeries may still be anchored in Westwood, he said, but tertiary and outpatient services cannot remain confined there if the system intends to meet rising demand.
“I think the only way to grow, especially if you have demand, is to either create more space or acquire more space, and then, of course, recruit and retain the best talent,” he said.
Where storytelling meets strategy
Dr. Esrailian’s leadership style reflects a background that extends well beyond medicine.
He arrived at the University of California in Berkeley, intending to major in both English and biology, drawn equally to storytelling and the dream of becoming a physician. He ultimately minored in English, but the sensibility never left. “I was always interested in storytelling, but I was also always interested in being a physician,” he said.
Now, in an administrative role, he sees those instincts as deeply relevant. “On a day-to-day basis, I use English for 90% of my day, as opposed to biology, because I’m more of an administrator,” he said.
That background informs how he advocates for UCLA internally and externally, whether with donors, institutional leaders or community partners. The work, he suggested, is partly operational and partly imaginative: articulating what the university can become and persuading others to help build it.
“You have to be a dreamer, but you also have to be a doer,” Dr. Esrailian said. “So I try to be both a dreamer and a doer.”
3 initiatives shaping the future of GI care
Inside the division, that vision is taking form through several major initiatives.
One is the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center, a research effort designed to deepen understanding of the microbiome’s role in human health and disease. Though rooted primarily in basic science, the center is also intended to support translational work that could eventually improve patient care.
“First, you have to really understand it and see if manipulating it or changing it in any way can help improve patient outcomes,” Dr. Esrailian said.
Another is the Walter and Shirley Wang Center for Integrative Digestive Health, announced last year and built around a more holistic approach to GI care. The center brings together GI physicians, psychologists and dietitians while integrating nutrition, wellness and mental health support into digestive disease treatment.
At its core is an acknowledgment that GI illness often cannot be treated well by focusing on the digestive tract alone.
“We wanted to build an entire center around that approach,” Dr. Esrailian said.
He pointed in particular to the center’s ability to expand access to services that are often difficult for patients to get quickly, especially behavioral health and nutrition support. “They were very focused on reducing wait times or access to psychologists and dietitians,” he said of Walter and Shirley Wang. “And we’re going to be able to do that because of their generous support.”
A third effort reaches even further across UCLA’s research enterprise: the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, a large-scale initiative being developed inside the former Westside Pavilion mall in Los Angeles. Dr. Esrailian is one of the founders.
For digestive diseases, he said, immunology and immunotherapy will be increasingly important, and the institute’s development has already created new opportunities to connect GI research with broader scientific infrastructure across the university. “These are all building blocks,” he said. “And if you don’t lay the foundation, you can’t take the next step.”
Several of the division’s initiatives have been made possible through partnerships with supporters connected to UCLA and the Los Angeles community, collaborations, Dr. Esrailian said, help accelerate research, expand patient access and support new models of care.
Defining quality beyond rankings
As the division expands, Dr. Esrailian said quality cannot be measured by reputation alone. “It’s not just about rankings in publications,” he said. “You have to be able to look in the mirror and say you’re the best, or you’re trying to be the best you can be.”
In GI, that means defining measurable standards and building the infrastructure to track them, whether through colon cancer screening, quality-of-life outcomes, validated colonoscopy indicators such as adenoma detection rate or patient and physician satisfaction measures. “You need to be able to measure it if you want to improve it,” he said.
To strengthen that work, UCLA established a quality program within the division and created a dedicated one-year fellowship focused on quality and health services research. The aim is to embed a culture of evaluation and improvement into the division’s daily operations rather than treating quality as an afterthought.
“It’s setting up the infrastructure to do that measurement,” Dr. Esrailian said. “And that’s an ongoing process that should never stop.”
A division built around people
For all the scale of the program and ambition of its initiatives, Dr. Esrailian repeatedly returned to a simpler point: institutions are ultimately built by people. He described a division with a strong training pipeline, a faculty drawn from multiple disciplines and a leadership model designed to capitalize on varied strengths across campuses and practices. Many current faculty members trained within UCLA’s own programs. Others came with advanced degrees outside GI, including public health and PhDs in other fields.
“The physicians, physician-scientists and scientists are the most critical element in serving our patients,” he said.
That perspective also shapes how he thinks about leadership across a large and geographically distributed program. Communication matters, but so does restraint. Rather than overwhelming faculty with constant institutional messaging, he said, UCLA’s GI leaders try to communicate strategically and empower local leaders across sites. “If an important issue comes up, nobody is unreachable,” he said.
The same team-first mentality influences recruitment. In a city known for star power, he said, the division’s success depends on attracting people who care not only about their own subspecialty or program, but about the broader mission. “One good thing about being in Los Angeles is you can have many stars,” Dr. Esrailian said. “We don’t just have one star.”
The division also prioritizes sharing knowledge beyond UCLA. Its annual Mellinkoff GI and Hepatology Symposium, now in its 14th year, brings physicians from across the country together in Los Angeles while also offering virtual participation for clinicians nationwide.
The broader community as the patient
Asked what ultimately ties the division’s work together, Dr. Esrailian pointed back to the larger community UCLA serves. Los Angeles is vast, diverse and constantly growing. For a public institution, he suggested, that reality demands more than prestige. It requires presence, accessibility and a long view. “The patients are the key for everything,” he said.
That belief runs through the division’s clinical expansion, its research agenda, its focus on education and its emphasis on partnerships that can endure. It is also visible in the way Dr. Esrailian speaks about UCLA itself, not just as a workplace, but as a home and an obligation. “UCLA is our home,” he said. “It’s been an institution that has created incredible opportunities for generations.”
For him, the work now is not simply to preserve that legacy, but to widen it: to make sure that as the division grows, it does so in a way that brings more patients, more communities and more future physicians into its orbit.
