community health Archives

Children’s National receives United Health Foundation grant

November 9, 2021

The grant enables a unique program – bringing together a team of school nurses in D.C. Public Schools, community health workers and mobile medical services.

The United Health Foundation, the philanthropic foundation of UnitedHealth Group, has awarded a three-year, $3.4 million grant to Children’s National Hospital to improve access to health care for school-aged children in Washington, D.C.’s most under-resourced communities. The support is part of the United Health Foundation’s ongoing commitment to build healthier communities and advance health equity.

The grant enables a unique program – bringing together a team of school nurses in D.C. Public Schools, community health workers and mobile medical services. Wards 7 and 8 face some of the largest health inequities in Washington, D.C., with high rates of child poverty, asthma, obesity and more.

“Children’s National has long worked to make sure every child in our region has access to high-quality care,” said Kurt Newman, M.D., president and CEO of Children’s National. “This new grant from the United Health Foundation will help us create another way to connect our pediatric experts with children and families who are not currently being served by health care providers. We are committed to helping children lead healthier lives which, in turn, makes them more likely to succeed in school and lead healthier lives as adults.”

School nurses employed by Children’s School Services will work with community health workers to connect children and families to mobile health services, Children’s National primary care locations and federally qualified health centers. Health records, immunization records and attendance data will be accessible through data sharing. As a result of the effort, children will receive well-child visits, including vaccinations and vision, hearing, behavioral health and developmental screenings. Additionally, via telemedicine, community health workers can link children to specialists to address behavioral health, asthma and other pressing health needs.

“Reaching school-aged children living in under-resourced communities to provide important routine health care can be challenging, especially amid a pandemic,” said Dr. Margaret-Mary Wilson, associate chief medical officer for UnitedHealth Group. “We are so pleased to be working with Children’s National on this innovative and comprehensive program to identify and close gaps in care — especially for those who have unaddressed needs.”

The effort aims to reduce school absenteeism among chronically absent students by connecting families to health supports and social services. It will also focus on increasing the number of children who are up to date on vaccinations, with a goal of providing 6,000 vaccinations over three years. Additionally, those who screen positive for mental or behavioral health issues will be referred to mental health specialists. The program is under the leadership of Hope Rhodes, M.D., M.P.H., medical director of THEARC, and one of the leaders of the Goldberg Center, and Danielle Dooley, M.D., M.Phil., medical director, Community Affairs and Population Health of the Child Health Advocacy Institute.

The grant will help address challenges identified in the Foundation’s recently released America’s Health Rankings 2021 Health of Women and Children Report. Some of the key findings of the report were:

Anxiety among children ages 3-17 rose 21% nationally between 2017-2018 and 2019-2020, from 7.5% to 9.1%.
Only 1 in 3 (34.3%) U.S. fourth grade public school students scored proficient or above on the national reading assessment. Later in life, there is a strong connection between education attainment and health, with those without a high school education facing the greatest social, economic and health challenges. National reading assessments are an important marker in educational development.
The prevalence of asthma among children in D.C. is 10%, higher than the national average of 7.5%.
On-time childhood vaccinations in D.C. are 75.3%, slightly lower than the national average of 75.8%.

The grant is one of the many ways the United Health Foundation continues to support efforts to build healthier communities and advance health equity. In September, UnitedHealth Group, including the United Health Foundation and UnitedHealthcare, announced a donation of $4.5 million to seven nonprofit organizations in Oklahoma to help increase health care, improve health outcomes and support communities across the state. And in July, the United Health Foundation established a $3.3 million grant partnership with the North Olympic Healthcare Network in Washington state to improve behavioral health for children and adults in the Port Angeles area. To learn more about UnitedHealth Group’s commitment to health equity, please visit the company’s sustainability website at sustainability.uhg.com.

Alexandra M. Sims, M.D., FAAP, counsels grads to know their who, how and why

May 20, 2019

Alexandra M. Sims, M.D., FAAP, general academic pediatrics fellow at Children’s National, tells newly minted George Mason social sciences graduates the concrete and abstract skills they learned during their collegiate experience are exceedingly valuable.

As a 10-year-old growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, lip syncing with friends as they pretended to be Destiny’s Child, Alexandra M. Sims, M.D., FAAP, predicted her future: She would become a doctor.

“Ten is a really funny age,” Dr. Sims told members of the 2019 graduating class from George Mason University College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the school and department from which she received her undergraduate degree in Anthropology. “I was old enough to feel compelled to contribute to the world meaningfully, but too young to know the weight of this undertaking. I was old enough to be intrigued by the science of the human body, but too young to be intimidated by the fact that there were no doctors in my family.”

Dr. Sims’ youngest sister, Bria, was born four weeks premature and died a few weeks after birth. The sting of that tragedy instilled in her a commitment to serve others and informed a lifelong passion to help society’s most marginalized.

Ten years after graduating George Mason herself, she invited this year’s newly minted graduates to distill their college experience into three terms: who, how and why:

Who means the family members and mentors who helped them enter college and persevere toward graduation.
How is their plan to change the world. The general academics pediatrics fellow at Children’s National asks kids about their unique superpower during visits to the primary care clinic at Children’s Health Center Anacostia. “I get a range of responses, and some of them are quite funny,” she told 800 social sciences graduates gathered for their degree celebration. “Some really surprise me in other ways. ‘I want to be kind.’ ‘I want to help people.’ ‘I want to take care of my parents.’ ”
Why is the reason they continue to do what they’re doing. For Dr. Sims, that’s service and mitigating health disparities, a mission that has led her to travel around the globe conducting HIV/AIDS outreach and building coalitions near and far. Her current work is domestic, as she seeks advocates for at-risk communities through health services research.

“So, come back to these when you’re feeling unsure or uneasy: your WHO, your HOW and your WHY. Know that your time here at Mason is time well spent, and that the skills that you’ve gained, both the concrete and the abstract, are exceedingly valuable,” she advised the group.

Stephen J. Teach, M.D., MPH, inaugural holder of new endowed chair

October 10, 2018

Stephen Teach does an asthma exam

Stephen J. Teach, M.D., M.P.H., has been named the inaugural Wendy Goldberg Professor in Translational Research in Child Health and Community Partnerships. This professorship comes with an endowed chair at Children’s National Health System.

The prestigious honor is given for the duration of Dr. Teach’s (and future chair holders’) employment at Children’s National. The award’s namesake, Wendy Goldberg, and her husband, Fred T. Goldberg Jr., are among the brightest stars in the constellation of Children’s National supporters, says Dr. Teach, Associate Dean for Pediatric Academic Affairs and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at The George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

In addition to serving on many Children’s boards, in the mid-2000s the Goldbergs made a $250,000 gift that benefited Improving Pediatric Asthma Care in the District of Columbia (IMPACT DC), Dr. Teach’s award-winning program to improve clinical care, empower patients and families, and conduct new research to improve patients’ outcomes.

“In recognition of the anchor aims of Children’s new strategic plan, the Goldbergs wanted this new gift to focus on the intersection of community health and research,” Dr. Teach says. “Thanks to their generosity, my team will work with community partners to use data to drive improvements in population health.”

With the dedicated funding Dr. Teach was able to hire a new staffer, Caitlin Munoz, to help mine electronic health records to create disease-specific registries that include 15,000 children and adolescents – the lion’s share of kids younger than 17 who live in Washington and have asthma.

“For the first time, we will be able to describe in granular detail the near-universe of local children who have this chronic respiratory disease,” he says. “We will be able to describe many of the most clinically meaningful aspects of nearly every child with asthma who lives in D.C., including mean age, gender, ethnicity and mean number visits to the emergency department.”

Such a richly textured database will help identify children who should be prescribed daily controller medications to help them avoid missing school days due to asthma exacerbations, he says. The next pediatric chronic disease they will track via registry will be pediatric obesity via elevated body mass index.

“That, in and of itself, is insightful data. But the enduring impact of this applied research is it will inform our continuous quality-improvement efforts,” he adds.

By querying the registries the team will be able to tell, for example, how Children’s primary care centers rank comparatively by asking such questions as which percentage of kids with asthma actually take the medicines they had been prescribed the year prior.

“Increasingly, clinical research falls into one of two buckets. You can either do better things: That’s discovering new drugs or processes, like our ongoing clinical trial to desensitize kids to asthma allergens. Or, you can do things better. We often know what to do already. We know that guideline-based asthma care works well. We don’t need to prove that again. We just need to do things better by getting this care to the kids who need it. That’s where this line of research/quality improvement comes in: It’s getting people to do things better.”

Desiree de la Torre named to The Daily Record’s 2018 VIP List

August 6, 2018

Desiree de la Torre

Desiree de la Torre, MPH, MBA, director of Community Affairs and Population Health Improvement at Children’s National, has been named one of The Daily Record’s 2018 VIP List — Very Important Professionals Successful by 40 awards.

The VIP List recognizes professionals 40 years of age and younger who have been successful in Maryland. Winners, chosen by a panel of previous VIP List honorees and business leaders, were selected on the basis of professional accomplishments, community service and commitment to inspiring change.

“I’m so happy to be selected as a 2018 Very Important Professionals (VIP) Successful by 40 winner,” says Desiree. “My parents instilled in me the importance of hard work, giving back to my community and a commitment to inspiring change – exactly what this award is about! When I first received the news, I called my parents because I owe my success to them.”

As director of Community Affairs and Population Health Improvement at Children’s National, Desiree leads the organization’s community health improvement strategic planning process, including support for community organizations, health equity and compliance with federal and local community benefit regulations. She is responsible for the development of new models of care that improve the health of populations and impact the social determinants of health. This includes multi-sector collaborations with community organizations, schools, government agencies and payers.

Desiree is a member of several local and national councils and associations. She holds a master’s degree in Public Health from Boston University, a master’s degree in Business Administration from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in Psychobiology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Desiree will be honored along with other awardees at a reception in September, hosted by The Daily Record.

Children’s Community Health Track receives prestigious APA Teaching Program Award

May 8, 2018

“As a community-focused health system, one of our central missions is to train a new generation of residents to create successful community partnerships and integrate public health concepts into the everyday practice of medicine to improve the health of underserved communities,” says Cara Lichtenstein, M.D., MPH.

The Children’s National Community Health Track (CHT) has been recognized by the Academic Pediatric Association with its prestigious Teaching Program Award. The honor was made public at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting on May 7, 2018 in Toronto, Ontario. The purpose of the award is to foster interest in the teaching of general pediatrics by giving national recognition to an outstanding general pediatric program. The PAS selection committee chose Children’s CHT for demonstrating excellence in educational teaching methods, acceptance by the community, its adaptability and the outstanding quality of residents trained in the program.

“As a community-focused health system, one of our central missions is to train a new generation of residents to create successful community partnerships and integrate public health concepts into the everyday practice of medicine to improve the health of underserved communities,” says Cara Lichtenstein, M.D., MPH and director of Children’s Community Health Track.

Children’s CHT focuses on underserved populations and the development of skills in health policy, advocacy and community healthcare delivery. Residents spend their outpatient time learning to use public health techniques to identify and address community health needs, becoming a physician advocate and learning more about the sociocultural determinants of health and health disparities. Training for CHT is integrated with Children’s overall pediatrics residency program to ensure excellence in attainment of clinical skills, and to allow residents the opportunity to work with Children’s top-rated primary care, specialty and hospital-based physicians and care teams.

This is the third time in recent years that Children’s National has been honored by the Academic Pediatric Association. In 2013, Mary Ottolini, M.D., MPH and vice chair of medical education was recognized for her leadership of Children’s Master Teacher Leadership Development program. In 2009, Denice Cora-Bramble, M.D., MBA accepted the APA Health Care Delivery Award for the Goldberg Center for Community Pediatric Health at Children’s National.

Children’s offers up to eight residency positions each year designated as Community Health Track positions. The goals of the track are centered on the core competencies of community pediatrics as described by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Primarily to train residents to:

Grasp the breadth of diversity inherent in the pediatric population and be familiar with health-related implications of cultural beliefs and practices of groups represented in the community.
Recognize the role of the pediatrician in identifying needs and facilitating access to resources for patients, families and communities.
Be aware of the risks to health and barriers to care for underserved children in Washington, D.C., and demonstrate skill in improving access to continuous comprehensive health maintenance.
Appreciate key issues related to the pediatrician’s role and interactions with local community agencies and advocacy groups.
Value the role of schools and childcare settings in supporting the educational and psychosocial development of children and adolescents.
Apply key principles about health promotion and disease prevention for children and adolescents over a set period of time.
Observe, interpret and report observations about the communities in which they serve.

The fundamental difference in this track compared to the more traditional Categorical Track lies in the outpatient experiences that occur in all three years of training. The CHT utilizes these outpatient experiences to help residents to attain a well-rounded community pediatrics experience.

“Washington, D.C. is an incredibly diverse community with large numbers of vulnerable children and families from D.C. and all over the world. Given our location in our nation’s capital, residents and faculty have the unique opportunity to work with national professional and advocacy organizations that are influencing policy – both locally and nationally – as it relates to children, families and health care,” says Mark Weissman, M.D., chief of general pediatrics and community health at Children’s National. “We’re thrilled to be recognized with the Academic Pediatric Association’s Teaching Program Award and grateful to Dr. Lichtenstein for her leadership and commitment to improving the health of D.C.’s children and training the next generation of pediatricians and advocates.”

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