Meet Quoc-Dien Trinh, MD, MBA, New Chair of Urology at UPMC Shares His Vision

Quoc-Dien Trinh, MD, MBA, was named as the new chair of the Department of Urology at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in late 2024. Dr. Trinh is professor and chair of the Department of Urology and the Frederic N. Schwentker Endowed Chair in Urological Surgery.

A nationally recognized surgeon-scientist, Dr. Trinh brings to UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh expertise in minimally invasive urologic oncology surgery, health services research, and disparities in cancer care delivery, in particular prostate cancer in underserved patient populations.

Immediately prior to joining UPMC, Dr. Trinh was the section chief of Urology at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, associate professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and co-director of the Prostate Cancer Program at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

In this interview, Dr. Trinh shares some perspectives on his background and training, his vision for growth in the Department, and some early examples of new clinical initiatives in store for the future.

Q: What attracted you to UPMC and the opportunity to lead the Department of Urology?

A: I was at a point in my career where I wanted to test myself in new ways and grow as a leader. I’ve been fortunate to hold roles at Brigham and Women’s and Harvard, and I felt ready to take on more. The opportunity at UPMC stood out because the department already has such strong clinical foundations. Joel Nelson built a highly efficient clinical enterprise here over 25 years that has an excellent reputation nationally and internationally for the quality of clinical care. Inheriting the leadership of this kind of infrastructure is a rare privilege. But, what excited me even more was the opportunity to grow the academic mission of the Department. I want to help create an environment where people can thrive clinically and academically, but also feel a sense of belonging, one in which our faculty and staff have a sense of agency to be the clinicians, researchers, and educators, and leaders they want to be.

Q: How would you describe the department’s national reputation?

A: The department at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh has a national presence that is connected to its size and the individual reputations of our faculty. If you work in academic urology, you are familiar with many of our faculty, who are world-class surgeons and leaders in the field. Across the board, our faculty are active in national and international societies, contributing to clinical guidelines, publishing incredibly meaningful and impactful research, and helping to shape how urology is practiced and evolves over time. What makes may job here exciting is that we are building from a position of strength. We have national visibility, and that gives us a platform to do even more, to be leaders in health services research, surgical innovation, education, and outreach.

Q: What role has robotic surgery played in the evolution of urologic care?

A: Robotic surgery has fundamentally reshaped urologic oncology, especially in how we treat localized prostate cancer. Over the past 20 years, it has become the predominant surgical approach for prostatectomies in the world. I have performed more than 1,500 robotic prostatectomies, and from that experience, I can say the technology allows for exceptional precision, which can translate into better outcomes.

All that being said, robotic surgery is not a panacea. It is a tool. The goal is not to do everything robotically just because you can, but to offer it as the right treatment, in the right way, for the right patient. That means being thoughtful about indications and resisting the temptation to use robotic assistance simply because it is there. We need to ask: What is truly best for the patient in front of us? If that’s an open procedure or laparoscopic approach, great. If it means using the robot, I’m on board. Looking ahead, the next frontier in robotic surgery may not be about the robot itself, but about what surrounds it such as better imaging, improved diagnostics, and smarter ways to match patients with the right approach. That is where we should be focusing our energy.

In retrospect, the impact of robotics goes beyond just its technical aspects. This renewed emphasis on improving the procedure has led us to reexamine many longstanding assumptions in perioperative care, like how long a catheter needs to stay in, how quickly a patient can be discharged. In Boston, we found that patients could often go home the same day with no increase in complications. That kind of progress forces the system to adapt and reconsider how we define quality and efficiency.

Another benefit that is often overlooked when talking about robotic-assisted surgery is surgeon ergonomics. Traditional open or even laparoscopic surgery can be physically demanding with awkward angles, extended standing, long cases. Robotic platforms are better designed from an ergonomic standpoint, and that matters. Surgeon well-being affects performance, longevity, and ultimately patient care. It is part of the value equation we need to pay attention to.

Q: Your research has focused heavily on disparities in prostate cancer care. What caused you to focus on this area in urology and why?

A: I grew up in Canada, where I had access to everything—high-quality public education, universal health care, and strong social safety nets. But when I moved to the U.S., I was struck by the magnitude of structural inequities in health care access and outcomes. During my fellowship in Detroit, it became clear how much an American patient’s trajectory could be influenced by race, socioeconomic status, and geography. These were not hypothetical issues. You could almost predict outcomes based on a patient’s zip code, insurance status, or racial background. That experience shaped my commitment to investigating these kinds of disparities in a systematic way.

So, I have a long standing interest in the question of why certain populations, particularly Black men, experience poorer outcomes in prostate cancer care. Some of this may have biological causes as there are data suggesting differences in genetic risk. But that alone cannot explain why Black men are more than twice as likely to die from prostate cancer than white men. I believe a significant part of that disparity is driven by access to care. It’s more than just about an individual’s race or if they live in an urban or rural setting. It also gets to structural issues that affect anyone who lacks access to timely diagnosis, advanced imaging, or high-quality surgical care. It could be a patient living blocks from a major cancer center, or someone four hours away in a rural area with limited primary care and long waits for MRI. These are the systemic barriers I am focused on addressing.

What we see in the data though is compelling. Among men who have aggressive prostate cancer, cases where nearly any clinician would agree that immediate treatment is the best course of action, Black men are still 20 percent less likely to receive that treatment. And there is no single explanation for it. It spans patient-level factors, like the inability to take time off work for treatment; system-level gaps, such as provider shortages or insurance limitations; and clinician-level issues, including communication style and cultural competency. These barriers interact in complex ways. We cannot assign blame to one source, but we also cannot make progress without acknowledging the full landscape of the problem.

In Boston, I helped develop the Prostate Cancer Outreach Clinic, which focused on patients from underserved communities who were falling through the cracks, meaning patients with abnormal PSA results who hadn’t gotten follow-up. We co-developed a PSA safety net, hired a dedicated navigator, and partnered with community organizations. Those included churches, reentry programs, neighborhood health workers. We needed more than just screening. We had to find a way to close the loop around care and follow-up and build trust with these patients.

I’m working now to launch a similar type of program in Pittsburgh because the need is not something specific to Boston and its patient population. There’s kind of universal need for this type of care throughout the U.S. We have recently secured funding from the Shadyside Foundation and are actively strengthening our partnerships with community organizations. This isn’t a solo effort. It requires partners across the health system and in the community. But if we make the effort, I think we can really change the patient care dynamic for the better, much as we were able to achieve with the program in Boston.

Q: What are some structural changes and clinical initiatives you are considering within the department, and will you be involved with any cross-disciplinary or system-wide projects happening at UPMC?

A: One of the realities of academic urology today is that residency training has changed. More programs have moved to a shorter five-year format, which compresses the timeline for clinical exposure. That affects how we teach, how we staff services, and how we prepare residents for practice. We need to adapt the way we structure rotations and responsibilities so that residents continue to receive comprehensive training without being overextended.

Another focus is the geographic spread of UPMC. We serve a large and diverse patient population, and we need to align subspecialty expertise with patient needs across the system. That means thinking strategically about where specific services are offered, how we handle complex referrals, and how we ensure consistency in care delivery.

We’ve already begun to make changes. We named a new vice chair for quality and safety and are currently conducting a system-wide review of case distribution, referral patterns, and operational efficiency. These are early steps in a larger effort to modernize how we function as a department so we can be clinically excellent, educationally robust, and responsive to the broader changes happening in the field.

I also serve on the Health Technology Assessment Program (HTAP), a small interdisciplinary initiative at UPMC led by the chair of the Ophthalmology Department, José-Alain Sahel. It includes a group of clinicians from across the system, and our role is to evaluate technologies and novel tools and try to accelerate their experimentation and possible adoption into the clinical care worlds of UPMC. The work this group will be doing helps ensure that new technologies are integrated thoughtfully, safely, and with a strong academic foundation. UPMC Enterprises is also part of that innovation ecosystem, and I see it as a major asset. As a department, we need to be active contributors in this space, testing ideas, piloting technologies, and helping shape the future of care delivery in a way that aligns with our academic mission.