Tag Archive for: telemedicine

asthma inhailer

Picture imperfect: Eliminating asthma triggers through smartphones

asthma inhailer

Children’s National is among five awardees sharing $10 million in funding under Fannie Mae’s Sustainable Communities Innovation Challenge: Healthy Affordable Housing, a national competition to identify innovative ideas to help children and families enjoy safer homes. Fannie Mae made the funding announcement on May 21, 2019.

Children’s funding will underwrite a pilot program to use smartphones to enable virtual home visits, leveraging the skills of Children’s pediatric asthma specialists, health educators and community housing remediation specialists who will video conference with families in the home to identify potential housing asthma triggers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 12 children and adolescents (6 million) have asthma, and one in six children with asthma visit the emergency department each year. In Washington, D.C., substandard housing can play an outsized role in triggering asthma exacerbations. Asthma-related hospital visits are 12 times higher in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, compared with affluent ZIP codes.

Working with community partners, Children’s faculty aim to eliminate asthma triggers right at the source, improving children’s well-being and creating healthier homes.

Right now during in-home visits, staff look for holes under kitchen sinks and gaps in the walls or flooring where pests and vermin might enter as well as leaks where mold and mildew can bloom. These systematic visits yield detailed notes to best direct resources to remediate those housing woes. The in-person visits however, are labor intensive and require delicate diplomacy to first open doors then to point out potential asthma triggers without coming off as judgmental.

“The beauty of our innovation is that residents can show us these same problematic locations using their smartphones, facilitating our efforts to target resources for that household. It’s a win for Children’s families because eliminating asthma triggers in the home means our kids will miss fewer school days, improving their lives and overall health,” says Ankoor Y. Shah, M.D., MBA, MPH, medical director for Children’s IMPACT DC Asthma Clinic.

Children’s collaborative project includes a number of partners, including:

Dr. Shah says the project will start in July 2019 with the pilot of virtual home visits starting in early 2020. This proof-of-concept model will hopefully be able to be replicated in other cities across the country.

Billie Lou Short and Kurt Newman at Research and Education Week

Research and Education Week honors innovative science

Billie Lou Short and Kurt Newman at Research and Education Week

Billie Lou Short, M.D., received the Ninth Annual Mentorship Award in Clinical Science.

People joke that Billie Lou Short, M.D., chief of Children’s Division of Neonatology, invented extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, known as ECMO for short. While Dr. Short did not invent ECMO, under her leadership Children’s National was the first pediatric hospital to use it. And over decades Children’s staff have perfected its use to save the lives of tiny, vulnerable newborns by temporarily taking over for their struggling hearts and lungs. For two consecutive years, Children’s neonatal intensive care unit has been named the nation’s No. 1 for newborns by U.S. News & World Report. “Despite all of these accomplishments, Dr. Short’s best legacy is what she has done as a mentor to countless trainees, nurses and faculty she’s touched during their careers. She touches every type of clinical staff member who has come through our neonatal intensive care unit,” says An Massaro, M.D., director of residency research.

For these achievements, Dr. Short received the Ninth Annual Mentorship Award in Clinical Science.

Anna Penn, M.D., Ph.D., has provided new insights into the central role that the placental hormone allopregnanolone plays in orderly fetal brain development, and her research team has created novel experimental models that mimic some of the brain injuries often seen in very preterm babies – an essential step that informs future neuroprotective strategies. Dr. Penn, a clinical neonatologist and developmental neuroscientist, “has been a primary adviser for 40 mentees throughout their careers and embodies Children’s core values of Compassion, Commitment and Connection,” says Claire-Marie Vacher, Ph.D.

For these achievements, Dr. Penn was selected to receive the Ninth Annual Mentorship Award in Basic and Translational Science.

The mentorship awards for Drs. Short and Penn were among dozens of honors given in conjunction with “Frontiers in Innovation,” the Ninth Annual Research and Education Week (REW) at Children’s National. In addition to seven keynote lectures, more than 350 posters were submitted from researchers – from high-school students to full-time faculty – about basic and translational science, clinical research, community-based research, education, training and quality improvement; five poster presenters were showcased via Facebook Live events hosted by Children’s Hospital Foundation.

Two faculty members won twice: Vicki Freedenberg, Ph.D., APRN, for research about mindfulness-based stress reduction and Adeline (Wei Li) Koay, MBBS, MSc, for research related to HIV. So many women at every stage of their research careers took to the stage to accept honors that Naomi L.C. Luban, M.D., Vice Chair of Academic Affairs, quipped that “this day is power to women.”

Here are the 2019 REW award winners:

2019 Elda Y. Arce Teaching Scholars Award
Barbara Jantausch, M.D.
Lowell Frank, M.D.

Suzanne Feetham, Ph.D., FAA, Nursing Research Support Award
Vicki Freedenberg, Ph.D., APRN, for “Psychosocial and biological effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention in adolescents with CHD/CIEDs: a randomized control trial”
Renee’ Roberts Turner for “Peak and nadir experiences of mid-level nurse leaders”

2019-2020 Global Health Initiative Exploration in Global Health Awards
Nathalie Quion, M.D., for “Latino youth and families need assessment,” conducted in Washington
Sonia Voleti for “Handheld ultrasound machine task shifting,” conducted in Micronesia
Tania Ahluwalia, M.D., for “Simulation curriculum for emergency medicine,” conducted in India
Yvonne Yui for “Designated resuscitation teams in NICUs,” conducted in Ghana
Xiaoyan Song, Ph.D., MBBS, MSc, “Prevention of hospital-onset infections in PICUs,” conducted in China

Ninth Annual Research and Education Week Poster Session Awards

Basic and Translational Science
Faculty: Adeline (Wei Li) Koay, MBBS, MSc, for “Differences in the gut microbiome of HIV-infected versus HIV-exposed, uninfected infants”
Faculty: Hayk Barseghyan, Ph.D., for “Composite de novo Armenian human genome assembly and haplotyping via optical mapping and ultra-long read sequencing”
Staff: Damon K. McCullough, BS, for “Brain slicer: 3D-printed tissue processing tool for pediatric neuroscience research”
Staff: Antonio R. Porras, Ph.D., for “Integrated deep-learning method for genetic syndrome screening using facial photographs”
Post docs/fellows/residents: Lung Lau, M.D., for “A novel, sprayable and bio-absorbable sealant for wound dressings”
Post docs/fellows/residents: Kelsey F. Sugrue, Ph.D., for “HECTD1 is required for growth of the myocardium secondary to placental insufficiency”
Graduate students: Erin R. Bonner, BA, for “Comprehensive mutation profiling of pediatric diffuse midline gliomas using liquid biopsy”
High school/undergraduate students: Ali Sarhan for “Parental somato-gonadal mosaic genetic variants are a source of recurrent risk for de novo disorders and parental health concerns: a systematic review of the literature and meta-analysis”

Clinical Research
Faculty: Amy Hont, M.D., for “Ex vivo expanded multi-tumor antigen specific T-cells for the treatment of solid tumors”
Faculty: Lauren McLaughlin, M.D., for “EBV/LMP-specific T-cells maintain remissions of T- and B-cell EBV lymphomas after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation”

Staff: Iman A. Abdikarim, BA, for “Timing of allergenic food introduction among African American and Caucasian children with food allergy in the FORWARD study”
Staff: Gelina M. Sani, BS, for “Quantifying hematopoietic stem cells towards in utero gene therapy for treatment of sickle cell disease in fetal cord blood”
Post docs/fellows/residents: Amy H. Jones, M.D., for “To trach or not trach: exploration of parental conflict, regret and impacts on quality of life in tracheostomy decision-making”
Graduate students: Alyssa Dewyer, BS, for “Telemedicine support of cardiac care in Northern Uganda: leveraging hand-held echocardiography and task-shifting”
Graduate students: Natalie Pudalov, BA, “Cortical thickness asymmetries in MRI-abnormal pediatric epilepsy patients: a potential metric for surgery outcome”
High school/undergraduate students: Kia Yoshinaga for “Time to rhythm detection during pediatric cardiac arrest in a pediatric emergency department”

Community-Based Research
Faculty: Adeline (Wei Li) Koay, MBBS, MSc, for “Recent trends in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area”
Staff: Gia M. Badolato, MPH, for “STI screening in an urban ED based on chief complaint”
Post docs/fellows/residents: Christina P. Ho, M.D., for “Pediatric urinary tract infection resistance patterns in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area”
Graduate students: Noushine Sadeghi, BS, “Racial/ethnic disparities in receipt of sexual health services among adolescent females”

Education, Training and Program Development
Faculty: Cara Lichtenstein, M.D., MPH, for “Using a community bus trip to increase knowledge of health disparities”
Staff: Iana Y. Clarence, MPH, for “TEACHing residents to address child poverty: an innovative multimodal curriculum”
Post docs/fellows/residents: Johanna Kaufman, M.D., for “Inpatient consultation in pediatrics: a learning tool to improve communication”
High school/undergraduate students: Brett E. Pearson for “Analysis of unanticipated problems in CNMC human subjects research studies and implications for process improvement”

Quality and Performance Improvement
Faculty: Vicki Freedenberg, Ph.D., APRN, for “Implementing a mindfulness-based stress reduction curriculum in a congenital heart disease program”
Staff: Caleb Griffith, MPH, for “Assessing the sustainability of point-of-care HIV screening of adolescents in pediatric emergency departments”
Post docs/fellows/residents: Rebecca S. Zee, M.D., Ph.D., for “Implementation of the Accelerated Care of Torsion (ACT) pathway: a quality improvement initiative for testicular torsion”
Graduate students: Alysia Wiener, BS, for “Latency period in image-guided needle bone biopsy in children: a single center experience”

View images from the REW2019 award ceremony.

Dr. Bear Bot

Advances in telemedicine start with new cardiac critical care robot

Dr. Bear Bot

Dr. Bear Bot’s “robot-only” parking space in the Cardiac ICU. Alejandro Lopez-Magallon, M.D., is featured on the robot display screen, where he drives the robot from his location in the command center, in order to visit patient rooms and capture additional medical information and connect with patients, parents, and attending nurses and physicians.

The telemedicine robot at Children’s National arrived in late August 2018 and recently completed a 90-day test period in the tele-cardiac intensive care unit (cardiac ICU) at Children’s National. The bot travels between rooms as a virtual liaison connecting patients and attending nurses and physicians with Ricardo Munoz, M.D., executive director of the telemedicine program and the division chief of critical cardiac care, and Alejandro Lopez-Magallon, M.D., a cardiologist and medical director of the telemedicine program.

Drs. Munoz and Lopez-Magallon use a nine-screen virtual command center to remotely monitor patient vitals, especially for infants and children who are recovering from congenital heart surgery, flown in for an emergency diagnostic procedure, such as a catheterization, or who are in the process of receiving a heart or kidney transplant. Instead of traveling to individual rooms to check in on the status of one patient, the doctors can now monitor multiple patients simultaneously, enhancing their ability to diagnose, care for and intervene during critical events.

If Drs. Munoz or Lopez-Magallon need to take an X-ray or further examine a patient, they drive the robot from its ‘robot-only’ parking space adjacent to the nurse’s station, and connect with attending doctors and nurses in the teaming area. The onsite clinicians accompany one of the telemedicine doctors, both of whom remain in the command center but appear virtually on the robot’s display screen, to the patient’s room to capture additional medical information and to connect with patients and families.

Over time, the telemedicine team will measure models of efficiency in the tele-cardiac ICU, such as through-put, care coordination, and standards of safety, quality and care, measured by quality of life and short- and long-term patient health outcomes. This test run will serve as a model for future command centers offering remote critical care.

Ricardo Munoz and Alejandro Lopez-Magallon

(R) Ricardo Munoz, M.D., executive director of the telemedicine program and the division chief of critical cardiac care, and Alejandro Lopez-Magallon, M.D., a cardiologist and the associate medical director of the telemedicine program in the tele-cardiac ICU command center.

“As technology and medicine advance, so do our models of telemedicine, which we call virtual care,” says Shireen Atabaki, M.D., M.P.H., an emergency medicine physician at Children’s National, who manages an ambulatory virtual health program, which enables patients to use virtual health platforms to connect with doctors, but from the comfort of their home. “We find the patient-centered platforms and this new technology saves families’ time and we’re looking forward to studying internal models to see how this can help our doctors, enabling us to do even more.”

The ongoing virtual connection program that Dr. Atabaki references launched in spring 2016 and has enabled 900 children to connect to a doctor from a computer, tablet or smart phone, which has saved families 1,600 driving hours and more than 41,000 miles over a two-year period. Through this program, virtual care is provided to children in our region by 20 subspecialists, including cardiologists, dermatologists, neurologists, urgent care doctors, geneticists, gastroenterologists and endocrinologists.

To extend the benefits of virtual communication, while saving mileage and time, Dr. Atabaki and the telemedicine team at Children’s National will partner with K-12 school systems, local hospitals and health centers and global health systems.

The Children’s National robot was named Dr. Bear Bot after a 21-day voting period with patients and staff, beating 14 other child-selected names, including SMARTy (Special Medical Access to Remote Technology), Dr. Bot and Rosie. Dr. Bear Bot celebrated with an official reveal party on Valentine’s Day, which was streamed to over 220 patients through the hospital’s closed-circuit television and radio station.

Ricardo Munoz

Ricardo Muñoz, M.D., joins Children’s National as Chief of Cardiac Critical Care Medicine, Executive Director of Telemedicine and Co-Director of Heart Institute

Ricardo Munoz

Children’s National Health System is pleased to announce Ricardo Muñoz, M.D., as chief of the Division of Cardiac Critical Care Medicine and co-director of the Children’s National Heart Institute. Dr. Muñoz also will serve as the executive director of Telemedicine Services at Children’s National, working to leverage advances in technology to improve access to health care for underserved communities and developing nations.

Within the new division of Cardiac Critical Care Medicine, Dr. Muñoz will oversee the work of a multidisciplinary team, including critical care nurse practitioners and nurses, respiratory and physical therapists, nutritionists, social workers and pharmacists, in addition to a medical staff with one of the highest rates of double-boarded specialists in cardiology and critical care.

“We are honored to welcome Dr. Ricardo Muñoz to Children’s National,” says David Wessel, M.D., executive vice president and chief medical officer of Hospital and Specialty Services. “He is a pioneer and innovator in the fields of cardiac critical care and telemedicine and will undoubtedly provide a huge benefit to our patients and their families along with our cardiac critical care and telemedicine teams.”

Dr. Muñoz comes to Children’s National from Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC. During his 15-year tenure there, he established the cardiac intensive care unit and co-led the Heart Center in a multidisciplinary effort to achieve some of the best outcomes in the nation. He also is credited with pioneering telemedicine for pediatric critical care, providing nearly 4,000 consultations globally.

“Children’s National has a longstanding reputation of excellence in cardiac critical care, and I am pleased to be able to join the team in our nation’s capital to not only deliver top-quality care to patients regionally, but also around the world,” says Dr. Muñoz. “The early identification and treatment of pediatric congenital heart disease patients has made rapid improvements in recent decades, but there is a shortage of intensivists to care for these children during what is often a complex recovery course.”

Dr. Muñoz attended medical school at the Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia, and completed his residency in pediatrics at the Hospital Militar Central, Bógota, Colombia. He continued his training as a general pediatrics and pediatric critical care fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, and as a pediatric cardiology fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. He then joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School and served as an attending physician in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Boston Children’s.

Dr. Muñoz is board certified in pediatrics, pediatric critical care and in pediatric cardiology. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Critical Care Medicine and the American College of Cardiology. Additionally, he is the primary editor and co-author of multiple textbooks and award-winning handbooks in pediatric cardiac intensive care, including Spanish language editions.

Taking telemedicine to heart

For seven years, a Children’s National team has worked on new technologies to blunt the severity of rheumatic heart disease around the world, vastly improving patients’ chances of avoiding serious complications.

Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) is caused by repeated infections from the same bacteria that cause strep throat, which progressively lead to worsening inflammation of the heart’s valves with each successive infection. Over time, these valves thicken with scar tissue and prevent the heart from effectively pumping life-sustaining, oxygenated blood. The devastating condition, which was endemic in the United States before 1950, is now so rare that few outside the medical community have even heard of it. But in the developing world, explains Craig Sable, M.D., director of echocardiography and pediatric cardiology fellowship training and medical director of telemedicine at Children’s National Health System, RHD is nearly as common as HIV.

“RHD is the world’s forgotten disease,” Dr. Sable says. An estimated 32.9 million people worldwide have this condition, most of whom reside in low- to middle-income countries — places that often lack the resources to effectively diagnose and treat it.

Dr. Sable, Andrea Z. Beaton, M.D., and international colleagues plan to overturn this paradigm. For the last seven years, the team has worked on developing new technologies that could blunt the severity of RHD, vastly improving patients’ chances of avoiding its most serious complications.

At the heart of their approach is telemedicine — the use of telecommunications and information technology to provide clinical support for doctors and other care providers who often practice a substantial distance away. Telemedicine already has proven extremely useful within resource-rich countries, such as the United States, according to Dr. Sable. He and Children’s National colleagues have taken advantage of it for years to diagnose and treat pediatric disease from a distance, ranging from diabetes to asthma to autism. In the developing world, he says, it could be a game-changer, offering a chance to equalize healthcare between low- and high-resource settings.

In one ongoing project, a team led by Drs. Sable and Beaton is using telemedicine to screen children for RHD, a critical step to making sure that kids whose hearts already have been damaged receive the antibiotics and follow-up necessary to prevent further injury. After five years of working in Africa, the team recently expanded their project to Brazil, a country riddled with the poverty and overcrowding known to contribute to RHD.

Starting in 2014, the researchers began training four non-physicians, including medical technicians and nurses, to use handheld ultrasound machines to gather the precise series of heart images required for RHD diagnosis. They deployed these healthcare workers to schools in Minas Gerais, the second-most populous state in Brazil, to screen children between the ages of 7 and 18, the population most likely to be affected. With each worker scanning up to 30 children per day at 21 area schools, the researchers eventually amassed nearly 6,000 studies in 2014 and 2015.

Each night, the team on the ground transmitted their data to a cloud server, from which Children’s cardiologists, experts in RHD, and a regional hospital, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, accessed and interpreted the images.

“There was almost zero downtime,” Dr. Sable remembers. “The studies were transferred efficiently, they were read efficiently, and the cloud server allowed for easy sharing of information if there was concern about any questionable findings.”

In a study published online on November 4, 2016 in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, Dr. Sable and colleagues reported the project’s success. Together, the team diagnosed latent heart disease in 251 children — about 4.2 percent of the subjects screened — allowing these patients to receive the regular antibiotics necessary to prevent further valve damage, and for those with hearts already badly injured to receive corrective surgery.

The researchers continued to collect data after the manuscript was submitted for publication. The team, which includes Drs. Bruno R. Nascimento, Adriana C. Diamantino, Antonio L.P. Ribeiro and Maria do Carmo P. Nunes, has screened a total of roughly 12,000 Brazilian schoolchildren to date.

Dr. Sable notes there is plenty of room for improvement in the model. For example, he says, the research team has not found a low-bandwidth solution to directly transmit the vast amount of data from each screening in real time, which has caused a slight slowdown of information to the hospital teams. The team eventually hopes to incorporate RHD screenings into annual health exams at local health clinics, sidestepping potential drawbacks of school day screenings.

Overall, being able to diagnose RHD using non-physicians and portable ultrasounds could eventually help Minas Gerais and additional low- to middle-income areas of the world where this disease remains endemic reach the same status as the United States and other resource-heavy countries.

“We’re putting ultrasound technology in the hands of people who otherwise wouldn’t have it,” says Dr. Sable, “and it could have a huge impact on their overall health.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Verizon Foundation and in-kind donations from General Electric and ViTelNet.

Diabetes telemedicine program launches study survey and retrospective chart review

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Telemedicine isn’t new. And diabetes telemedicine isn’t new either. But the Diabetes Program at Children’s National Health System is doing more than just providing education and support groups via telemedicine. The largest pediatric diabetes program in the Mid-Atlantic region is evaluating just how successful its telemedicine program is with a six-month survey and retrospective chart review. “This is our opportunity to prove [the success] not anecdotally but with evidence,” says Colleen Meehan, M.D., M.P.H., a third-year resident at Children’s and one of the co-investigators for the project.

According to published literature, the Children’s National cohort is one of the largest of any other diabetes telemedicine program and extends the time period of care.

History of the program

Around the world, there isn’t enough endocrinology care, says Fran Cogen, M.D., C.D.E. Dr. Cogen and others at Children’s National have recognized the need right in their region—and worldwide—to deliver specialty care to patients who live too far from Washington, DC.

Many of the patients Dr. Cogen sees at Children’s National live on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, including the island of Tangiers, and in Delaware. That’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and an obstacle to scheduling follow-up appointments. To solve this issue, Children’s National partnered with Peninsula Regional Medical Center, in Salisbury, Md., three years ago to improve patients’ quality of life while getting them the care they needed.

How the program works

A nurse practitioner at Peninsula Regional sees patients for blood glucose checks and more frequently. Once a month, or depending on the severity of the diabetes, Dr. Cogen will observe—on a large TV screen from Children’s National—physical examinations, and then review insulin regimens and dosing, download the glucose meters in real time, discuss concerns, and develop treatment plans. There’s diabetes-specific software that patients can see at Peninsula Regional.

What the study can reveal

A 2014 pilot survey showed caregivers had great satisfaction with the program. Now, the team wants to formally study caregiver satisfaction and patient quality of life, as measured by a validated diabetes-specific Pediatric Quality of Life survey. With the largest cohort in diabetes telemedicine (75, type 1), it will also look at frequency of blood glucose monitoring, HbA1c, incidence of ER visits and hospitalizations for DKA or hypoglycemia, and percentage of missed clinic appointments. The team believes that this will show the diabetes telemedicine program is as effective as traditional face-to-face visits.

Other specialties at Children’s National are planning to provide telemedicine services, and some already do. The Diabetes Telemedicine Program is looking to expand coverage in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, to other rural areas that lack pediatric endocrinology or diabetes specialists.

“We can deliver quality care and develop a personal relationship without actually being physically present in the exam room,” Dr. Cogen says.