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This handout is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.
The MomDoc Story, 1976–2026
When Dr. Clifford James Goodman Jr. opened his solo obstetrics and gynecology practice in Chandler, Arizona, on June 23, 1976, the surrounding landscape was dominated by cotton fields and dairy farms. Chandler was a quiet community of just 20,000 people. Today, fifty years later, Chandler is a thriving hub of the Silicon Desert, and that single clinic has blossomed into MomDoc, the largest and most trusted women's healthcare group in the state of Arizona.
Our foundation was built on a multi-generational legacy of civic duty and medical excellence spanning five generations and two continents. Dr. Goodman Jr. inherited a passion for healing from his father, Dr. Clifford Goodman Sr., a beloved Chandler family physician in the 1950s, and his grandparents, both trained pharmacists who ran Goodman's Pharmacy in Mesa. The roots reach deeper still: his great-grandfather, Dr. William Erastus Platt, practiced frontier medicine in the Arizona Territory for over forty years. And through his marriage to Nadina Hofstätter, the granddaughter of a Viennese gynecologist educated at the University of Vienna, the practice carries the legacy of two medical traditions across three thousand miles and a hundred years of history.
What does fifty years of independent practice mean for you? It means your provider works within a clinical network that took five generations to build. It means institutional knowledge passed from physician to physician, long-standing relationships with every major hospital system in the Valley, and a practice culture shaped by its founders rather than a corporate boardroom. Over 100,000 pregnancies delivered. Over 70 providers who chose to be here. That continuity of care is something no recently assembled health system can replicate.
From a frontier doctor's buggy to Arizona's dominant women's health enterprise.
Dr. William Erastus Platt begins practicing medicine in Arizona's Gila Valley. He travels by horse and buggy, treats patients in five Native American languages, and becomes known as the "Healer of the West."
George Nicholas Goodman and Clara Platt Goodman, both licensed pharmacists, open Goodman's Pharmacy in Mesa. George will go on to serve five terms as Mayor of Mesa.
Clifford James Goodman Sr. is born in Mesa, establishing the generational medical lineage that would anchor the practice in Arizona.
Born April 11 in Washington, D.C., while his father completed medical studies at George Washington University.
Dr. Goodman Sr. opens a family medical practice in Chandler, AZ (population 3,800), becoming a community cornerstone.
Dr. Goodman Sr. is named the hospital's first Chief of Staff when it opens on July 17 with 40 beds, 25 employees, and 91 volunteers.
Forces 18-year-old Clifford Jr. to return to Arizona to support his seven younger siblings, cementing his ties to the Valley.
During his LDS mission in Germany, Clifford Goodman Jr. meets Nadina Hofstätter in Hamburg. Nadina is the granddaughter of Viennese gynecologist Dr. Robert Matthias Hofstätter and the daughter of renowned psychologist Prof. Peter R. Hofstätter.
Clifford Goodman Jr. marries Nadina Hofstätter in August, merging the Arizona medical lineage with the Vienna Medical School tradition.
Graduates from George Washington University with the Kane-King Obstetrical Society Award for outstanding achievement in OB/GYN. He chose the same medical school where his late father had trained.
Following his Navy service, Dr. Clifford Goodman Jr. opens his solo OB/GYN practice in Chandler. The Silicon Desert is dawning.
Intel locates operations in Chandler, triggering a massive population boom of young, reproductive-age families.
Dr. Scott R. Partridge joins the Chandler office, forming the foundational partnership ("Goodman & Partridge") that would guide the organization for decades.
The practice performs the hospital's first vaginal delivery, first C-section, and first general surgery. Also delivers the only two sets of triplets ever born at the facility.
The partnership officially transitions to a corporate LLC/LTD structure on July 13, managing the growing complexities of healthcare administration.
Initiates the corporatization era. At the time: 2 physicians, 1 office. His "Switzerland" philosophy would transform the practice statewide.
Elected at Chandler Regional Hospital. Goodman and Partridge remain the only two OB/GYNs to ever serve as Chief of Staff in the hospital's history.
MomDoc becomes an early adopter of the Electronic Health Record, improving patient safety and care coordination years ahead of the industry standard.
The name "Drs. Goodman & Partridge" worked in Chandler but couldn't scale. "MomDoc" is born: accessible, memorable, and infinitely expandable.
Launch of a targeted practice dedicated to holistic, midwifery-led care for mothers seeking lower-intervention birth experiences.
Launch of a culturally tailored practice serving the rapidly growing Spanish-speaking community with seamless, bilingual care.
Launch of the Women For Women practice, providing an all-female provider environment for patients specifically requesting female-led care.
The practice outgrows its 50-provider EHR license. Provider count reaches 58, with projections of 65+ imminent.
After forty years of active clinical practice, Dr. Clifford Goodman Jr. retires. As the obituary later noted: with him, medicine was not a job or a career. It was a definition.
The proprietary "Living Room" model proves perfectly adapted for COVID-19 social distancing. Virtual Visits launch via eVisit.
Dr. Clifford James Goodman Jr., MD, FACOG, passes away peacefully in Show Low, Arizona, surrounded by his wife Nadina, his six children, and loved ones. His legacy endures in every clinic, every provider, and every family served.
16+ clinics, 70+ providers, 360+ employees. Launch of modernized digital architecture and the celebration of half a century of care.
The MomDoc story does not begin in 1976. It begins in the Arizona Territory, before statehood, with a doctor on a horse.
Dr. William Erastus Platt (1858-1941) practiced frontier medicine in the Gila Valley for over forty years. His patients hung white tea towels on their gates when they needed him, and he spotted the flags from his horse and buggy. He learned five Native American tribal languages to communicate with his patients. He once performed an emergency appendectomy with a butcher knife when proper instruments could not be found. After his wife Isabelle's death, he organized a mass tonsillectomy for valley schoolchildren: more than two hundred procedures in two days, assisted by his three eldest daughters. A newspaper clipping from the era called him "Graham County's good Samaritan." Two of his daughters became registered pharmacists. Three of his grandsons became doctors.
One of those daughters was Clara Platt, who married George Nicholas Goodman. Both were licensed pharmacists. They founded Goodman's Pharmacy in Mesa in 1912, and George parlayed the civic trust he earned behind the prescription counter into five terms as Mayor of Mesa during the decades when Arizona transitioned from territory to state. For the Goodman family, healthcare and public service were never separate vocations.
Their son, Dr. Clifford James Goodman Sr. (1921-1962), left Mesa to attend the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. He returned to the Southwest and opened a family medical practice in Chandler in 1951, when the town held barely 3,800 residents. He was a general practitioner in the fullest sense: vaccinations, broken bones, heart conditions, and delivering babies. When Chandler Community Hospital opened its doors on July 17, 1961, with 40 beds and 91 volunteers, he was named its first Chief of Staff.
Weeks before the hospital opened, the family threw a celebration: "Life Begins at Forty." It was meant to mark a new chapter. The hospital was open. The legacy was in motion. Decades of practice lay ahead.
Clifford Sr. died on March 28, 1962, at the age of forty. He left behind his wife Earlene and eight children. His eldest son, Clifford Jr., was eighteen years old.
When Dr. Goodman Jr. met Nadina Hofstätter in Hamburg during his LDS mission in the early 1960s, he was encountering far more than a future spouse. Nadina carried the intellectual lineage of the Vienna Medical School itself.
Her grandfather, Dr. Robert Matthias Hofstätter (1883-1970), was a gynecologist trained at the University of Vienna during the faculty's golden age, receiving his MD in 1907. He practiced at the Wiener Allgemeine Poliklinik (Vienna General Polyclinic), where he became a pioneer of endocrine research, publishing continuously on pineal gland therapeutics from 1916 through the postwar era. He remained in Vienna through the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, two world wars, and Nazi occupation. While many of his colleagues fled into exile, he stayed and preserved the Viennese clinical tradition.
Her father, Prof. Peter R. Hofstätter (1913-1994), became one of postwar Germany's most influential psychologists. He held the Chair of Psychology at the University of Hamburg from 1959 to 1979. His Fischer-Lexikon Psychologie sold over 600,000 copies and became the definitive German-language psychology reference. He received the Konrad Adenauer Prize in 1984 for his contributions to German intellectual life.
The parallel between the two families runs deep. A Viennese gynecologist's granddaughter married an Arizona gynecologist. Two medical traditions, separated by three thousand miles and nearly a century, converged in a single family. When Nadina and Clifford built MomDoc together, they wove together the rigorous clinical culture of the Vienna Medical School with the community-rooted, frontier-born healthcare ethos of the American Southwest.
Nadina proved to be far more than a physician's spouse. She became a co-builder of the practice, managing the growing enterprise while raising their six children. She brought the intellectual discipline of a family where academic achievement and medical service were baseline expectations, along with a fluency in German-language medical culture that broadened the practice's worldview. The MomDoc enterprise carries the imprint of both lineages.
Born on April 11, 1943, in Washington, D.C., while his father was completing medical studies, Clifford James Goodman Jr. was seemingly destined to inherit the family's medical mantle. Displaying early intellectual rigor, he skipped the eleventh grade and graduated as salutatorian of Chandler High School in 1960.
Earning an academic scholarship, he initially enrolled at the prestigious University of Chicago. However, following the sudden death of his father, immense familial pressures necessitated a return to Arizona. To be closer to his grieving mother and seven younger siblings, he transferred to the University of Arizona and later Arizona State University.
Between 1963 and 1965, his academic trajectory paused when he elected to serve a full-time LDS mission in Germany. This period in Europe cultivated a lifelong fluency in the German language and, fatefully, introduced him to Nadina Hofstätter in Hamburg, where her father held the Chair of Psychology at the university. The couple married in August 1966.
Following his father's footsteps with deliberate intention, Dr. Goodman Jr. attended George Washington University School of Medicine, the same institution where his father had trained a generation earlier. He earned his M.D. in 1971. His profound aptitude for women's healthcare was recognized early: during his senior year, he received the Kane-King Obstetrical Society Award, distinguishing him as the outstanding senior student in Obstetrics and Gynecology. He remained in Washington to complete his specialty residency at GWU Hospital, finishing in the spring of 1974.
Following residency, Dr. Goodman fulfilled a commitment to the United States Navy, serving as a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Medical Corps stationed at Marine Corps Base Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Military medicine demands maximum efficiency, optimal resource management, and strict adherence to a chain of command. For a newly trained obstetrician, this environment provided early opportunities for independent practice and leadership far earlier than the civilian sector typically afforded.
Even during his military service, Chandler pulled him back. With every leave, to pay the bills for his growing family, he covered a practice in Mesa from June 1974 to June 1976. Much of that time was spent at Chandler Regional Hospital, where his own father had served as the hospital's first Chief of Staff when it opened.
The rigors of military discipline, synthesized with the academic excellence of his GWU training, forged Dr. Goodman into a formidable clinician. It reinforced his ability to maintain exceptional composure during crises, a trait absolutely essential for an obstetrician managing emergency cesarean sections, sudden fetal distress, and complex delivery complications.
His Navy service forged the clinical composure and operational discipline that would define his entire career.
In 1976, his military obligations fulfilled, Dr. Goodman returned to the arid landscape of his youth. The promise to care for his community, forged in the wake of his father's death, manifested when he officially founded his solo OB/GYN practice on June 23, 1976.
The timing represented an extraordinary convergence. In 1976, Chandler was a transitional zone of roughly 20,000 residents, still reliant on agriculture. But the late 1970s marked the dawn of the "Silicon Desert." Intel located its operations in Chandler in 1979 and 1980, followed by Northrop Grumman, Microchip, and NXP Semiconductors.
This massive influx of high-tech manufacturing brought thousands of young, reproductive-age families to the East Valley. The cotton fields rapidly gave way to subdivisions. Dr. Goodman positioned his practice perfectly at the crest of this demographic wave, transitioning from being simply a doctor in the town to the doctor for an entire generation of families.
Under his guidance, the practice achieved numerous clinical firsts. Members of the practice performed Chandler Regional Medical Center's first vaginal delivery, first C-section, and first general surgery in 1984. They hold the unique distinction of delivering the only two sets of triplets ever born at the facility.
The volume of the Chandler population boom could not be serviced indefinitely by a solo practitioner. Dr. Goodman sought a partner who shared his clinical rigor, academic excellence, and community-focused ethos. He found that partner in Dr. Scott R. Partridge.
Originally from Cheyenne, Wyoming, Dr. Partridge brought a stellar pedigree. He completed undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University in 1976, graduating Magna Cum Laude with a major in Zoology and minors in Chemistry and Spanish, a linguistic capability that would prove vital as Arizona's demographics shifted. He earned his M.D. from the University of Colorado School of Medicine in 1979, where he was nominated Outstanding Student in Obstetrics and Gynecology. He completed his OB/GYN residency at Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, bringing him to the Valley permanently.
Together, they formed Drs. Goodman & Partridge, OB/GYN, Ltd., officially incorporated as a PLLC on July 13, 1998, with Dr. Goodman as President and Dr. Partridge as Vice President.
The clinical synergy between the two physicians was profound. Throughout his career spanning over 45 years, Dr. Partridge personally oversaw more than 20,000 pregnancies. Both physicians served as Chief of Staff at Chandler Regional Medical Center, the only two OB/GYN physicians in the hospital's history to hold the position. Dr. Goodman served two terms, the only Chief of Staff to do so, and during one of those terms oversaw the hospital's relocation from its original McQueen and Chandler Boulevard site to its current campus. Dr. Partridge also served twice as Chairman of the OB/GYN Department.
Notably, Dr. Goodman was personally recruited by Eddie Basha, the prominent Arizona businessman and philanthropist, to modernize the hospital's labor and delivery department.
The only two OB/GYN physicians to have ever served as Chief of Staff, illustrating the stature of their practice in the local medical hierarchy.
The enduring success of Goodman & Partridge reached well beyond clinical excellence. Both founders embedded themselves in the social fabric of the East Valley.
Dr. Partridge dedicated 25 years to coaching Boy Scouts of America Varsity Scouts and served as President of the Emerson Elementary School PTA. Recognizing a deficit in public health education, he frequently lectured fifth and sixth-grade students on human growth and development, demystifying reproductive health for the community's youth.
The practice contributed to local charities and civic organizations: the Pregnancy Care Center of Chandler, the Support Team for Education and Learning Associations, Mesa Public Schools, the Adopt-A-Highway program, the Two Sisters One Heart Foundation, and Women of Power International. Dr. Partridge shared 51 years of marriage with his wife Cheryl, raising five children and twenty grandchildren.
They were not simply physicians. They were neighbors.
By the turn of the millennium, the traditional partnership model faced severe macroeconomic pressures: declining insurance reimbursements, escalating administrative overhead, complex EHR implementation, and consumer demand for extended clinical hours.
Nick Goodman was appointed CEO in 2001. At the time: two physicians, one office. His stated philosophy centered on alignment, striving to preserve physician independence by acting as "Switzerland," a neutral entity capable of interfacing with massive systems like Banner Health and Dignity Health without being absorbed.
The primary hurdle was brand identity. The name "Drs. Goodman & Partridge" functioned perfectly in Chandler, but lacked the scalable universality required for a multi-city enterprise. The organization rebranded to MomDoc, a name designed to be accessible, memorable, and infinitely expandable.
In 2011, MomDoc expanded into three specialized practices: MomDoc Midwives for holistic, midwifery-led care; Women For Women for patients requesting an all-female provider environment; and Mi Doctora for seamless bilingual care in the growing Spanish-speaking community.
The expansion was methodical. By the early 2010s: 150 employees. By 2014, the practice had outgrown its 50-provider EHR license. Internal records show the provider count had swelled to 58, with projections reaching 65+. Today, MomDoc employs over 360 people and operates 16+ locations, the largest women's healthcare group in Arizona, with an economic impact exceeding $160 million.
MomDoc consistently differentiated itself by aggressively adopting emerging medical technologies. The practice was the first OB/GYN organization in Arizona to offer 3D and 4D Live Motion Ultrasound, providing expectant parents with unprecedented visualization of the fetus and profound psychological reassurance compared to traditional 2D sonography.
The practice became an early adopter of robotic-assisted surgery using the da Vinci system for complex gynecological procedures including hysterectomies, myomectomies, and sacrocolpopexies. The result: enhanced surgical accuracy and dramatically reduced patient recovery times compared to traditional open abdominal surgeries.
In 2020, MomDoc rapidly deployed Virtual Visits via the eVisit platform, ensuring uninterrupted care during COVID-19. The practice's signature "Living Room" model (which had already eliminated communal waiting areas) proved perfectly adapted for pandemic-era social distancing.
As the 50th anniversary approached, the organization undertook a massive digital restructuring: migrating from a legacy Wix platform to a modernized, serverless architecture with dynamic content generation, automated social sharing cards for all providers and locations, and provider biographies rewritten in a "magazine profile meets trusted friend's recommendation" voice.
On the evening of May 29, 2022, Dr. Clifford James Goodman Jr., MD, FACOG, passed away peacefully in Show Low, Arizona, surrounded by his wife Nadina, his six children, and many loved ones. He had retired from active practice in 2016 after forty years of clinical service, but he never stopped being a doctor. His passing closed a remarkable chapter, but the values he built the practice on continue to shape every MomDoc clinic and every patient interaction.
"Dr. Goodman was one of the most compassionate Doctors I worked with in my years as a nurse at Chandler Regional Hospital."JoAnn Street, RN | Chandler Regional Hospital Nursery
As MomDoc approaches its 50th anniversary on June 23, 2026, the organization spans 16+ locations, 70+ providers, and 360+ team members across the Valley. What Dr. Goodman started in a single Chandler office has become Arizona's largest women's healthcare group, serving hundreds of thousands of families across three generations.
The roots of this practice stretch back to a frontier doctor in the Gila Valley, through a Mesa pharmacy, a hospital founding in Chandler, a medical school in Washington, a chance meeting in Hamburg, and the intertwining of two families who, across two continents, chose the same calling. The cotton fields are long gone. The promise remains.