This afternoon at 12 PM join Tyra Bryant-Stephens, MD for her seminar series presentation, "The Community Asthma Prevention Program (CAPP): Road to Achieving Health Equity." Tyra Bryant-Stephens is a faculty member at PolicyLab and the medical director of CAPP. CAPP was designed to improve the health and well-being of children with asthma by providing free asthma classes in the community for parents and their children with asthma. 

Meeting Link: https://bluejeans.com/179473629

Meeting ID: 179 473 629

Each year, AAMI recognizes health technology’s best and brightest for their leadership, dedication, and contributions to AAMI and their fields. This year, CPCE Faculty Member Chris Bonafide, MD, MSCE, Sara B. DeMauro, MD MSCE, Melissa C. McLoone RN, BSN, and James C. Won, PhD of the Patient Safety Learning Laboratory (PSLL) were awarded the 2021 Patient Safety Award! This award recognizes outstanding achievements by healthcare technology professionals who have made a significant advancement toward improving patient safety. Congratulations to the entire PSLL team!

The Academic Pediatric Association recently selected Aditi Vasan’s proposal, “Impact of Government Nutrition Assistance Program Participation on Children's Healthcare Utilization and Expenditures”, for funding by the 2021 APA Young Investigator Awards Program through the APA YIA Funding Path. Through this award, Aditi will receive funding for this project and will be paired with a National Advisor who’ll provide advice and input on the project. Congratulations to Aditi and her project mentors, Chén Kenyon and Alex Fiks, on this accomplishment! 

Date: April 7, 2021

Time: 12:00 - 1:30 pm

Join the Penn Center for Health Equity Advancement in partnership with Little Giant Creative, a social impact focused creative agency, for a frank and candid discussion of the deep seated racism within our society and the healthcare system, the historical events antecedent to the impacts we see today as well as highlight potential solutions. Learn more and register here.

This year’s inaugural symposium will bring together researchers, health practitioners, students, and the public at large to learn about the intersection of racism and health and discuss how we can collectively propose sustainable solutions towards health equity. Learn more and register here.

Continuing its longstanding collaboration with the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, the ASA, NISS and SCT is delighted to announce the 13th Annual Conference on Statistical Issues in Clinical Trials: Cluster Randomized Trials (CRTs) - Challenges and Opportunities. Learn more and register here.

*For CPCE/PolicyLab Virtual Seminar Series: If you would like to participate in any of the virtual events and did not receive an Outlook invitation, please contact [email protected]. 

Abusive intra-abdominal injuries are less common than other types of injuries identified in victims of child physical abuse, but they can be deadly. Identification of intra-abdominal injuries can be important clinically or forensically. Abusive intra-abdominal injuries can be clinically occult, necessitating screening laboratory evaluations to inform decisions regarding imaging. Kate Henry, MD, MSCE, Joanne Wood, MD, MSHP and their colleagues describe the clinical, laboratory and imaging evaluation of the abdomen in the setting of suspected child abuse.

Acute gastroenteritis (AGE) is a common pediatric diagnosis in emergency medicine. Little is known about racial/ethnic differences in care in the setting of standardized care models. Christopher Bonafide, MD, MSCE and his team used quality improvement data for children 6 months to 18 years presenting to the emergency department (ED) for AGE/dehydration. Non-Hispanic-Black, Hispanic, and Non-Hispanic-other children were less likely to receive IVF or hospital admission and had shorter length of stay compared to Non-Hispanic-White counterparts. There was no difference in patient revisits which suggests discretionary overtreatment of Non-Hispanic-White patients, even with clinical guidelines in place. 

Researchers including Ariel Williamson, PhD, and Olivia Cicalese examined whether cumulative risk exposure moderated the link between sleep problems, including insomnia and poor sleep health, and child psychological outcomes. 205 caregiver-child dyads completed child sleep, family sociodemographic, and child psychological functioning questionnaires. Increased insomnia symptoms were significantly associated with increased child internalizing, externalizing, and global executive functioning impairments controlling for child age, race/ethnicity, and sex. Poor sleep health behaviors were associated with internalizing concerns. Children with the poorest sleep health behaviors and highest cumulative risks had the greatest internalizing concerns.

Jeffrey Gerber, MD, PhD, MSCE and his research team performed a retrospective cohort study to identify practice patterns in the duration of prescribed antibiotics for the treatment of ambulatory children with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and to compare the frequency of adverse clinical outcomes between children prescribed short- versus prolonged-duration antibiotics. Most children treated for CAP as outpatients are prescribed at least 10 days of antibiotic therapy. Among pediatric outpatients with CAP, no significant differences were found in rates of adverse clinical outcomes between patients prescribed short- versus prolonged-duration antibiotics.

CPCE faculty member Scott Lorch MD, MSCE and his colleagues ran a secondary analysis to determine the extent to which newborns with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) are concentrated in some hospitals as compared with newborns without NAS and whether care quality and safety differed among these hospitals. Of the 659,403 newborns in this study, 3,130 were diagnosed with noniatrogenic NAS. They found that newborns with NAS were cared for in different hospitals compared with newborns without NAS (Gini coefficient 0.62, 95% confidence interval, 0.56-0.68) and that the hospitals in which they received care were rated as having poorer quality and safety (Gini coefficient 0.12, 95% confidence interval, 0.01-0.23).

The increasing prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic pose concerns for the clinical management of solid organ transplant recipients (SOTR). Wearable devices that can measure physiologic changes in biometrics show utility for the early detection of infection before the clinical presentation of symptoms. Early detection of SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens in SOTR could facilitate early interventions. Ongoing studies testing the utility of wearable devices for early detection of SARS-CoV-2 and other infections in the general population are reviewed here by Joseph W. Rossano, MD, MS, Sandra Amaral, MD, MHS, and their colleagues.

The impact of COVID-19 public health interventions on pediatric illnesses nationwide is unknown. Chén Kenyon, MD, MSHP and his team performed a multicenter, cross-sectional study to assess changes in pediatric healthcare utilization during the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with substantial reductions in encounters for respiratory diseases; these large reductions were consistent across illness subgroups. Although encounters for nonrespiratory diseases decreased as well, reductions were more modest and varied by age. Encounters for respiratory diseases among adolescents declined to a lesser degree and returned to previous levels faster compared with those of younger children.