Born in Israel, where his parents immigrated in 1944 after suffering Nazi persecution, Dr. Goldschmid and his family immigrated to Canada and later to Detroit. He attended the University of Michigan as a physics major, but his dad wanted him to be a doctor. They worked out a compromise: David would apply to only one medical school; if accepted, he would go; if not, he would study engineering/physics. He was accepted, and after three years as an undergraduate, he moved over to the University of Michigan Medical School. His internship was at the University of Toronto. In the few months before the internship began, Dr. Gold-schmid accepted a research position with the Endocrine Service at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. Joyce, his wife to be, was a registered nurse on the endocrinology floor there; they met and history was made. His residencies were at the University of Toronto and McGill University in Montreal. Feeling he would be a smarter chief resident after practicing for a while, Dr. Goldschmid came out to California to be the health officer of Yuba County for a year before becoming a chief resident in internal medicine at McGill.

When a fellowship in endocrinology became available in Florida, near where Dr. Goldschmid’s younger brother was finishing his internship, the family was off again, this time to the University of South Florida in Tampa and to a little moonlighting at two nearby hospital emergency rooms. It was during this period that two of the Goldschmid children were diagnosed with deafness. After thorough testing at McGill, a leading proponent of the oral deaf program, the recommendation was made to enroll the children in the Peninsula Oral School for the Deaf in Redwood City, which brought the family to the Bay Area. Dr. Goldschmid’s brother came west as well and is chief of gastroenterology at the University of Arizona Hospital in Tucson.

In 1981 Dr. Goldschmid opened an endocrinology solo practice in San Jose for which he regularly received 20 or so beeper calls from patients a night. At the same time he was staff physician and director of emergency services at Rideout Memorial Hospital in Yuba City. After about five years of this kind of wear and tear and unable to find a partner for the practice, he turned it over to a clinic and became a staff physician and later director of Emergency Services at Seton Medical Center. However, breaking away from his endocrinology patients proved more difficult than he had imagined, so Dr. Goldschmid worked part-time at the clinic in San Jose for several more years, along with his work at Seton. It’s called overlap!

Throughout the ’90s Dr. Goldschmid wore many hats at Seton in addition to his work in the ER. He was medical director of the House Physician Program, which provided in-house doctors for night and weekend duty. After he took over the program, he used only IM board certified physicians. He started and developed Seton’s Occupational Medicine Clinic and is still its director. In this position he was for three years medical examiner for San Francisco International Airport, giving advice on how to keep employees fit and free of illness. He was chair of the Department of Family Practice from 1996 to 2000, which was primarily an administrative job along with presiding over JCAHO surveys for the Emergency Department.

When Seton’s pediatricians threatened to resign from ER back up call, he created a Careline program, manned by pediatric RNs, to take first call. "The pediatricians didn’t want more money; they just wanted their sleep, so we gave them that," he said. He developed an electronic database to create a log and automatically fax the documentation to physicians’ offices. It solved the problem.

Dr. Goldschmid helped establish a successful peer review program for the Emergency Department that has been in effect since 1998. With approximately 22,000 emergency room patient visits a year, this program has helped limit malpractice experience in the department to only three cases with merit. In 1999, along with a neurologist, he also authored Seton’s stroke treatment protocol, which only now is undergoing an update review.

One of his accomplishments Dr. Goldschmid considers a best effort was helping redefine the trauma plan for San Mateo County. It took several years of meetings, negotiations, and persuasion to bring to fruition, but together with Robert Spencer, M. D., Barbara Pletz, administrator for the San Mateo County Emergency Medical Services, and an outside consultant, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors eventually agreed to change the system so that all of the county’s Code 3 trauma cases are taken to San Francisco General Hospital or to Stanford Medical Center, where they can receive appropriate treatment. "This one change has dramatically improved our practices," he explained.

From those early college days as an engineering student, Dr. Goldschmid learned to write computer code and to do theoretical electronics. He has put those talents to good use at Seton, helping with the electronic record system, and on the outside for about five years (1995-1999) as a consultant and employee of the Palo Alto company, Oceania, designing software.

The Goldschmid children have followed suit: Josh is an engineer at Boeing in Seattle; Renee is a software designer in Cupertino; and Michelle, with ties to NASA, is the executive director of the Robotics Academy tasked with building a robot to walk on the moon by 2009. Michelle also is helping her dad build a robot, but just now is distracted by her upcoming September marriage to a medical student at Boston University.

Dr. Goldschmid enjoys being a doctor, but he wishes he received more "thank yous" from his patients. He explains that doctors are accustomed to giving patients what they need, but many patients who come into emergency rooms these days tell doctors what they want, and when they don’t get it, they’re unhappy. Wife Joyce, on the other hand, who gave up nursing to pursue her natural talent as a photographer, receives thank yous and compliments for her work on a regular basis, which is quite gratifying. She recently was awarded a 2005-2006 Peninsula Press Club Professional Journalism Award for one of her magazine covers.

Although he claims to be cutting back on his clinical hours, Dr. Goldschmid is the new president-elect of the Medical Staff at Seton for the next two years, and of course there is the presidency of the Medical Association. He says that as SMCMA president he is stimulated by the exposure to politics his new position allows him, and he likes getting to know more doctors than he would otherwise have met. It is his opinion that organized medicine stops many bad things from happening to doctors. "I didn’t appreciate it when I was younger; I have just come to understand that it doesn’t matter so much whether you have power; it doesn’t so much matter that people do what you tell them to do; it is just the fact that you’re sitting at the table face-to-face that makes it much more difficult for bad things to happen."

As SMCMA president Dr. Goldschmid hopes to continue the outreach to the community that Dr. Caughey emphasized. "We need to increase our involvement in local community affairs, and I intend to do everything I can to keep the county hospital open," he said. "Those are my two top priorities, and beyond that I am concerned about what might happen in January with Medicare and that the cutbacks that were rescinded last year may happen this year."

Inspite of Dr. Goldschmid’s various personas and impressive accomplishments—laid-back personality, dedicated physician, expert negotiator and problem solver, computer nerd, family man—it is a pleasure to find he is also an especially nice guy.