All in the Family: Parents Meaningfully Engaged in Pediatric Research Consortium

The Pediatric Research Consortium (PeRC) is the primary care practice-based research network at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. PeRC is dedicated to improving the safety, quality and health outcomes of pediatric care through clinical research. In 2013, PeRC established a Parent Advisory Board comprised of four parents from different backgrounds, levels of education, and geographic areas who provide meaningful input to guide implementation of PeRC's portfolio of research studies. Here, Dr. Alexander Fiks, CPCE Associate Director for Outpatient Research Activities and PeRC Medical Director, and colleagues discuss the Parent Advisory Board of PeRC. The formation of the Parent Advisory Board was also recently described in a Pediatrics article.

Cornerstone | December 12, 2018

Upcoming Events

Changes to the IRB Common Rule Governing Human Subjects Research

Date: Friday, January 11, 2019

Time: 11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Location: Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, 1-120 A&B 

Heather Cathrall, MBE, CIP from CHOP IRB Operations will be discussing the revisions to the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (the "Common Rule") that are due to go into effect on January 21, 2019. See the flyer  for additional information or RSVP here .

CPCE & PolicyLab Visiting Speaker Series: Dr. Gabriel Escobar 

Date: February 22, 2019 

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm 

Location: Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, 1-120 A&B 

Gabriel J. Escobar, MD, is a research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, director of the Division of Research Systems Research Initiative; and Regional Director for Hospital Operations Research for Kaiser Permanente Northern California. Dr. Escobar's research interests include risk adjustment, predictive modeling, severity-of-illness scoring, the use of comprehensive inpatient and outpatient electronic medical records for health services research, and the use of real-time decision support tools that are embedded in the electronic record.  

Recent Publications

Prevalence and predictors of alcohol and drug use among secondary school students in Botswana: a cross-sectional study.

Alcohol and illicit drug use has been recognized as a growing problem among adolescents in Botswana. Little is known about factors affecting alcohol and drug use among Botswana's secondary school students. To aid the design and implementation of effective public health interventions, Dr. Elizabeth Lowenthal and colleagues sought to determine the prevalence of alcohol and drug use in secondary school students in urban and peri-urban areas of Botswana, and to evaluate risk and protective factors for substance use.

HPV vaccine recommendation profiles among a national network of pediatric practitioners: understanding contributors to parental vaccine hesitancy and acceptance.

Practitioner communication is one of the most important influences and predictors of HPV vaccination uptake. The objective of this study from CPCE Associate Director Dr. Alexander Fiks and colleagues was to conduct a latent class analysis characterizing pediatric practitioner HPV recommendation patterns. Researchers identified three distinct practitioner HPV vaccine recommendation profiles: (1) Engagers, who followed national age-based guidelines and strongly recommended HPV vaccination, (2) Protocol Followers, who also strongly recommended HPV vaccination but were less likely to engage families in a discussion about benefits; and (3) Ambivalent HPV Vaccine Recommenders, who delayed or did not recommend HPV vaccination. Practicing in a suburban setting was associated with twice the odds of being an Ambivalent Recommender relative to being an Engager. These findings underscore the importance of continued efforts to bolster practitioner adoption of evidence-based approaches to HPV vaccine recommendation.

Quality Improvement Initiative to Improve Abuse Screening Among Infants With Extremity Fractures.

Child abuse and maltreatment research at CPCE is focused on improving quality of care delivered within the medical and child welfare systems to suspected victims of child maltreatment through developing and testing clinical guidelines. The aim of this study from Dr. Joanne Wood, Dr. Kate Henry and colleagues, was to evaluate the effectiveness of clinical pathway implementation and quality improvement interventions to increase the percentage of infants with extremity fractures undergoing evaluation for suspected physical abuse.

Comparable on-therapy mortality and supportive care requirements in Black and White patients following initial induction for pediatric acute myeloid leukemia.

Black patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) are more likely to present with high acuity and consequently experience higher rates of induction mortality than white patients. Given the consistently identified racial disparities in overall survival among patients with AML, Dr. Richard Aplenc, Dr. Brian Fisher, and colleagues aimed to evaluate whether there were sustained on-therapy racial differences in inpatient mortality, intensive care unit (ICU) requirements, or supportive care beyond initial induction.

Association of Extending Hospital Length of Stay With Reduced Pediatric Hospital Readmissions. Hospital readmission rates are widely used as a quality measure for hospitalized patients. Hospital readmission gained attention largely from concerns about the quality of discharge care, including those patients discharged before they were adequately prepared to leave the hospital. In adult patients, shorter length of stay is associated with a higher risk of hospital readmission for some conditions but this association has not been shown in children, and it remains unknown whether specific pediatric conditions might benefit from increasing length of stay. This study from Dr. Stephanie Doupnik and colleagues explored the association between index hospitalization LOS and pediatric readmissions.

Preventing Bloodstream Infections and Death in Zambian Neonates: Impact of a Low-cost Infection Control Bundle.

Sepsis is a leading cause of neonatal mortality in low-resource settings. As facility-based births become more common, the proportion of neonatal deaths due to hospital-onset sepsis has increased. Dr. Susan Coffin and colleagues conducted a prospective cohort study in a neonatal intensive care unit in Zambia where they implemented a multi-faceted infection prevention and control (IPC) bundle consisting of IPC training, text message reminders, alcohol hand rub, enhanced environmental cleaning, and weekly chlorhexidine gluconate bathing. Hospital-associated mortality was lower during the intervention than baseline period, indicating that a simple IPC bundle can reduce sepsis and death in neonates hospitalized in high-risk, low-resource settings.

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