March 31, 2023 | Office of the President & Chief Research Officer

Dear Teammates,

Our current healthcare system predominantly reacts to changes in health and fails to anticipate them. Children with complex or recurring chronic health concerns exemplify the gap in our current healthcare delivery, often leaving them severely ill before getting the care needed to put them back on track to their best health. Recent advancements in remote patient monitoring technology, accelerated by the global pandemic, present a unique opportunity to explore novel healthcare delivery methods for patients outside the hospital or clinical settings. To move the field forward, researchers must ask and answer the right questions, ensuring that implementing emerging remote technologies allows us to deliver the best quality and value of care possible.

This month, I would like to highlight Manne Research Institute’s new advantage in applying research to advance healthcare delivery at home, part of a new Health@Home research agenda. Through their clinical, research, and technological expertise, Carolyn Foster, MD, MS, Co-Research Lead of Digital Health, and Juan Espinoza, MD, our inaugural Chief Research Informatics Officer, create a powerful collaboration to nucleate exciting research in this area. Their teamwork and those they bring together in this field will lead to transformative insights into remote patient monitoring technology and help uncover the most effective strategies for monitoring patients at home, ultimately achieving optimal health outcomes.

While companies increasingly invest in developing and implementing digital health services and devices, a more rigorous research approach is necessary to utilize these technologies effectively. Carolyn and her research team tackle this knowledge gap by exploring the use of virtual visits, apps, sensors, and other technologies. They aim to determine which patients benefit from these approaches, when they are most effective, what technologies help patients by reducing hospital visits or managing chronic diseases, and how to integrate them with existing provider workflows.

The next generation of technology for healthcare delivery at home generates excitement but commonly without a holistic, child-centric view of the problem-to-technology solution relationship. Juan brings that expertise, accumulated in part as an FDA-funded investigator and director of the West Coast Consortium for Technology and Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP). Juan’s knowledge will be instrumental in expanding the research infrastructure available to Carolyn and other investigators and integrating new emerging technologies into our larger care systems through a robust digital health informatics framework. This integration will be fundamental to the research and new care models that Carolyn and other investigators envision.

Through the Health@Home initiative, Carolyn and Juan focus on future opportunities, such as pilot grants to stimulate research on remote monitoring technologies and leveraging outcomes to drive innovation in the marketplace through corporate partnerships and investment. What makes the Health@Home initiative particularly exciting is its positioning of Lurie Children’s and Manne Research Institute as leaders in the field, generating transformative innovations that can accelerate and enhance diagnoses and treatments, create alternative home care options to free up much-needed beds in pediatric hospitals, and improve the lives of patients and their families.

With kindness and respect,

Pat