Claire O'Connell Boogaard, MD, MPH

Medical Director, COVID-19 Vaccine Program

Pediatrician

Claire Boogaard, MD, MPH, is a board-certified clinical pediatrician at Children’s Health Center at THEARC and a medical director of the Pediatric Health Network at Children’s National Hospital.  She holds appointments as an affiliate faculty member of the Child Health Advocacy Institute at Children’s National and an assistant professor of Pediatrics at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

After graduating magnum cum laude from Boston College with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology, she pursued her Doctor of Medicine and Master’s in Public Health at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, graduating Alpha Omega Alpha in 2011. She went on to complete her pediatric internship, residency and chief residency at Children’s National and joined the Children’s Health Center at THEARC as a clinical attending and assistant professor of Pediatrics in 2015. 

Along with providing preventive and urgent care in the clinical setting, Dr. Boogaard has held a variety of leadership roles in resident and fellow education, clinical management and public health program development.  As interim medical director for the Children’s Health Center at THEARC, she helped lead the team through an expansion in 2018, quadrupling space and adding onsite dental and specialty care for the community of Ward 8. 

As medical director for the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine program, she partnered with multidisciplinary leaders and regional stakeholders to coordinate an effective, equitable, and patient-centered COVID-19 vaccine distribution and administration strategy. She helped expand the mass vaccine model to clinic-based distributive model to ensure equitable uptake, successfully administering >27,000 doses to >16,000 individuals, 67% of whom were living in high-risk neighborhoods and >60% identifying as Black/African American and 14.5% identifying as Hispanic. Her most recent leadership role as medical director of the Pediatric Health Network allows her to provide clinical expertise and oversight to quality improvement initiatives and value-based care contract negotiations for the Children’s National Pediatric Health Network. 

Dr. Boogaard is passionate about delivering high quality and equitable healthcare, focusing on prevention and strength-based interventions. She actively enjoys engaging with community members and multidisciplinary healthcare teams to enhance programmatic development and provide education to improve individual and community health outcomes.   

• General and Community Pediatrics