Improving Hospital-to-Home Transition for Children

Kavita Parikh, M.D., M.S.H.S., and her team are funded by a career development award from the Agency of Health Research and Quality. She is piloting a community-based hospital-to-home transition plan for patients and their caregivers after a hospitalization for an asthma exacerbation. A patient-centered transition plan is being developed from qualitative interviews with stakeholders, including caregivers, asthma educators, primary care physicians, hospitalists, pulmonologists, school nurses and payers. The program will be piloted by enrolling children during a hospitalization for an asthma exacerbation and following them outpatient.

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Improving Parent-Clinician Communication during Critical Illness

Tessie October, M.D., M.P.H., and her team are funded by a NIH K23 award to evaluate strategies for improving parent clinician communication during decision-making for critically ill children. The team is pilot testing a communication skills training intervention targeted to clinicians and assessing this intervention in terms of outcomes at the parent, patient, and clinician level. As a young investigator, Dr. October has received additional funding from the Children's National Board of Visitors grant, a CTSI-CN Voucher Award, and The George Washington University Fellowship program to support her research program.

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Improving Pediatric Trauma Resuscitation

The Improving Pediatric Trauma Resuscitation program focuses on improving teamwork during trauma resuscitation and improving pre-hospital pediatric trauma triage. Randall Burd, M.D., Ph.D., leads a multidisciplinary research team that studies errors and teamwork in trauma resuscitation, with collaborators in emergency medicine and surgery, informatics, computer science and biomedical engineering. In addition, he directs R01-funded projects to develop statistical approaches for real-time prediction of outcome after pediatric injury and to build an approach for automatic tracking and monitoring of teamwork during trauma resuscitation.

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Transition from Pediatric to Adult Care for Adolescents with Complex Chronic Conditions

Transition from pediatric to adult care for adolescents with severe chronic disorders is a major healthcare challenge, which might interfere with quality of care of these patients. Lisa Tuchman, M.D., M.P.H., and her team draw upon clinical and advocacy experience in caring for chronically ill adolescents and young adults by focusing research effects on improving the healthcare transition process from pediatric to adult-oriented care. Research aims to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of the delivery of chronic care management in the setting of healthcare transition.

Dr. Tuchman is PI on a Maternal and Child Health Bureau-funded grant aimed to address unmet mental health needs amount transition aged youth cared for at Children's National Hospital. She also serves as co-investigator on multiple federally funded projects designed to improve care transitions and self-management skills for chronically ill adolescents, including those with cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, and sickle cell disease and survivors of childhood cancer. This research contributes to the development of evidence-based transition programs in clinical settings nationwide.

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