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Spotlight on: Dr. Kristen Feemster

Please join us in congratulating Kristen Feemster, MD, MPH, MSHP on her new role with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, as Medical Director of both the Immunization Program and Acute Communicable Diseases in the Division of Disease Control.

Dr. Feemster received her MD and MPH degrees from Columbia University, completed pediatrics residency and infectious diseases fellowship at CHOP, and received a MSHP degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has included vaccine hesitancy, acceptance, and decision-making; understanding how neighborhood and individual factors affect infectious diseases epidemiology; and infection prevention policies within pediatric ambulatory healthcare settings.

A recent study by Dr. Feemster and colleagues found that healthy children are exposed to communicable diseases in primary care settings. More specifically, pediatric clinic visits during respiratory virus season were significantly associated with an increased incidence of subsequent influenza-like illness in children aged 2 – 6 years. These results could aid in the development of effective infection-prevention strategies for primary care settings, which offer multiple opportunities for disease transmission.

Though she is now at the Department of Public Health full time, Dr. Feemster will retain an adjunct faculty position and continue her role as Director of Research for the Vaccine Education Center at CHOP. She will also continue to collaborate with the Pediatric IDEAS research group and PolicyLab.
Upcoming Events
CHOP Quality and Safety Day 2018
Date: May 15, 2018
Time: 8:00 am - 4:00 pm
Location: Stokes Auditorium, CHOP Main Hospital
Paula Davis-Laak, JD, MAPP, will present the keynote address, “Thriving in Healthcare: Your Blueprint for Stress Resilience.”  Register for the conference or submit an abstract that highlights the way your team has applied the CHOP Improvement Framework, Safety Behaviors for Error Prevention, or other strategies. Abstracts are due Friday March 30, 2018 at 5:00 pm.

Webinar: Be Antibiotics Aware: Smart Use, Best Care
Date: May 15, 2018
Time: 1:00 pm EST
CDC Public Health Grand Rounds is a monthly scientific presentation featuring the important work that CDC is doing to protect people and save lives. During this month’s webinar speakers will discuss efforts to measure and improve antibiotic prescribing through antibiotic stewardship. Join in to hear lessons learned from improving antibiotic use in pediatrics, and what providers and health systems can do to improve use for adults. Additional information available here.

Methodology Spotlight: Mobile Health Intervention Optimization 
Date: June 5, 2018
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, Room 1-120B
Mobile devices facilitate our ability to deliver supportive treatments anytime and anywhere. A critical question in the optimization of mobile health interventions is: "When and in which contexts, is it most useful to deliver treatments to the user?" This question concerns time-varying dynamic moderation by the context of the effectiveness of the treatments on user behavior. This session will explore the micro-randomized trial design and associated data analyses for use in assessing moderation.
Find more information or register online here.

Webinar: Playing Catch-up -- How to Address US’ Lag in Reducing Child Mortality Rates
Date: June 5, 2018
Time: 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST
Health policy stakeholders, government agency staff, child health policy advocates, elected officials, and healthcare providers are invited to join a webinar entitled “Playing Catch-up -- How to Address US’ Lag in Reducing Child Mortality Rates.” The Center for Injury Research and Prevention at CHOP is hosting a 90 minute webinar to identify the underlying causes of mortality in children under age 1 and adolescents 15-19 years, discuss the three major contributing factors driving the lag in US child mortality rates, and discuss the evidence-based policies which should be implemented to address these issues. Find additional information about the speaker & panelists or register online here. 

Penn MSHP 2018 Implementation Science Institute
Dates: June 19 - 21, 2018
Location: Jordan Medical Education Center
The purpose of the Implementation Science Institute is to provide participants with the tools to design and execute rigorous implementation science research. The Institute will give an introduction to the foundations of implementation science, cover implementation strategies and sustainability, tips for grant writing and skill development. Limited scholarships will be available for affiliates of CHOP. Register here or contact mshp@mail.med.upenn.edu for more information.

Conference: Code Red: Battling the Plague of Gun Violence
Date: June 21, 2018
Time: 8:00 am – 3:30 pm
Location: Thomas Jefferson University, Hamilton Building, 1001 Locust Street, Connelly Auditorium, Philadelphia
A day-long conference to educate about gun violence and create a network of health care providers committed to policy solutions. With keynote addresses from David Hemenway, Professor, Harvard School of Public Health & Allison Anderman, Managing Attorney, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Violence. Register online.
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Recent Publications
Septic arthritis is considered an infectious disease emergency, because delayed control of the initial infection can lead to long-term joint damage. However, the results of blood and joint fluid cultures in children with septic arthritis are often negative. CPCE researchers performed a retrospective review of a cohort of children with septic arthritis to determine the epidemiology and management of culture-negative septic arthritis in children. They found that a majority of the infections were culture negative, which can make management of the infection challenging. Additional research is needed to determine the most appropriate antimicrobial therapy in children with culture-negative septic arthritis.

Patient-reported outcomes are joining laboratory and radiographic studies, biomonitors, and clinical exams in the repertoire of tools that clinicians use to evaluate treatment effectiveness. For children with asthma, there are several measures of asthma symptoms and the impact of asthma symptoms on functional status that are already in widespread use, but a missing piece in the asthma patient-reported outcome profile is a tool for assessing general health. Here Dr. Guevara and colleagues evaluate the reliability and validity of the PROMIS Pediatric Global Health scale, a 7-item measure of perceived physical, mental, and social health, in children with asthma. 

At least 1 in 5 children experience a mental health condition during childhood or adolescence, and more children with mental health concerns than ever before require emergency department (ED) and acute hospital care. Currently, EDs and acute care hospitals primarily focus on crisis stabilization for patients with severe mental health concerns. Although hospitals are not equipped to replace community-based ambulatory mental health services or inpatient psychiatric treatment, opportunities exist to better address mental health concerns during ED and hospital encounters.

Overuse and inappropriate selection of antibiotics have been described in most healthcare settings. With increasing antimicrobial resistance and limited new antibiotics under development, the identification of high-impact targets for antibiotic stewardship is critical. This research from Pediatric IDEAS faculty member Dr. Brian Fisher and colleagues explores the prevalence and drivers of hospital-level variability in antibiotic utilization among hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT) recipients to inform antimicrobial stewardship initiatives. 

Although intrauterine devices (IUDs) have been available in the United States for decades, utilization rates remain low among adolescent and your adult women. The contraceptives more commonly used by young women are significantly less effective than IUDs, so improving IUD use is an important step in decreasing rates of unintended pregnancies. Concern about discomfort during placement is a major barrier to IUD use. Dr. Akers and colleagues evaluated satisfaction with IUD insertion procedures among adolescent and young adult women to help improve our understanding of young women’s experiences during the procedure. They found that higher pain during IUD insertion was the only variable consistently associated with lower odds of satisfaction with the procedure, suggesting that pain reduction interventions may be important for young women undergoing IUD placement. 

Funding Opportunities
The foundation awards grants for research focused on issues faced by care providers that, when implemented, will improve health, nutrition, and/or developmental outcomes for infants and young children. Projects can address the etiologic mechanisms of disease; new, improved, or less invasive diagnostic procedures; the reduction or elimination of side effects; the alleviation of symptoms; new, improved, or less invasive therapies or treatments; dosage or dosing requirements or mechanisms for drugs, nutrient supplementation, or other therapeutic measures (under or overdosing); and preventative measures. The total requested grant size should be no more than $350,000.

The purpose of the Reach Awards program is to advance the foundation's mission to find cures and better treatments for childhood cancers by providing support that helps move hypothesis-driven research into the clinic. To that end, the program supports late translational studies needed to ultimately initiate a clinical trial. Priority will be given to projects that, if funded, will result in the initiation of a clinical trial within two to three years. Grants of up to $250,000 will be awarded over two years.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has issued a Request for Proposals for its Evidence for Action: Making Health a Shared Value program. The purpose of the program is to improve the foundation's understanding of the Action Area 1 drivers and outcomes related to health, well-being, and equity, particularly with respect to disadvantaged children and families. To that end, the foundation seeks evidence on the extent to which Action Area 1 drivers — mindsets and expectations, sense of community, and civic engagement — can be changed through intervention at the individual or population levels, resulting in better health, well-being, and equity outcomes.

The Children’s Cardiomyopathy Foundation is accepting Letters of Intent from investigators for basic science, clinical, population/epidemiologic, and translational research on cardiomyopathies affecting children age 18 and younger. Grants of up to $50,000 will be awarded to studies focused on the causes, diagnosis, or treatment of dilated, hypertrophic, restrictive, arrhythmogenic right ventricular, and left ventricular non-compaction cardiomyopathy. The grants are designed to provide seed funding to help secure long-term funding by the National Institutes of Health and other major granting institutions.

Through the FWW Research Awards program, the foundation will award grants of up to $25,000 for research projects, with an emphasis on cardiovascular disease, female cancers, the role of hormones in disease, and/or stage-of-life health concerns such as pregnancy and menopause and diseases disproportionately affecting women. 

The Rheumatology Research Foundation is accepting applications for its 2018 Scientist Development Award, an annual program designed to provide support for a structured, formal, clinical, or basic science research training program for rheumatologists or health professionals in the field of rheumatology. Grants of up to $225,000 for up to three years will be awarded to individuals in the early stages of their careers or those without significant prior research experience who plan to embark on a career in biomedical and/or clinical research in arthritis and rheumatic diseases. 

The American Legion Child Welfare Foundation supports organizations that contribute to the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual welfare of children. The foundation awards grants for the dissemination of information about new and innovative programs designed to benefit youth or information already possessed by well-established organizations. Projects must have the potential to help American children in a large geographic area (more than one state).

Last year, the NIH received approximately $30 billion in federal support. In spite of this amount, about 42,500 grants were not funded. To address these unfunded proposals, the NIH has a new Pilot Program that is designed to match researchers with nonprofit disease Foundations or with investments from private companies. Through a new collaboration between the NIH and the private contractor Leidos, researchers can now upload their unfunded NIH Proposals into an online portal at the Online Partnership to Accelerate Research (OnPAR). Foundations and other potential funders can review the NIH scores, and decide whether they might be interested in funding the Projects. Currently, this Pilot Program allows researchers with priority scores better than the 30th percentile to submit their abstracts. Interested Foundations might ask that a researcher send their full NIH Application along with its scores. The consensus opinion is that there are a lot of worthy grants being submitted to the NIH, but there is only so much funding available. OnPAR is one way of trying to match researchers with private Foundations. 
About CPCE
We are a pediatric research center dedicated to discovering and sharing knowledge about best practices in pediatric care by facilitating, organizing and centralizing the performance of clinical effectiveness research -- research aimed at understanding the best ways to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases in children. CPCE’s multidisciplinary team conducts research on a diverse range of clinical effectiveness topics grouped within four areas of research: