Quality and Safety

Lamia Soghier and Billie Lou Short

The ‘secret sauce’ for high-performing NICUs

Lamia Soghier and Billie Lou Short

Quoting the literature, Lamia Soghier, M.D., Children’s NICU medical unit director, and Billie Lou Short, M.D., chief of Children’s Division of Neonatology, write that hospitals with strong performance-improvement programs share eight critical factors in common.

Leaders of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) across the nation share the same play books as they strive to provide safe, high-quality medical and surgical care for vulnerable newborns. A growing number of quality collaborations share best practices and evidence-based guidelines across the nation in the hopes of replicating quality and safety success stories while minimizing harms.

Still, NICUs that use similar interventions in similar fashions often do not achieve identical results.

“This unexplained variability in outcomes between NICUs begs the question: What is the secret sauce? Why do some NICUs consistently outshine others in spite of the application of the same ‘potentially best practices,’ ” the leaders of Children’s award-winning NICU ask in an editorial published online July 12, 2018, by Archives of Disease in Childhood (ADC) – Fetal & Neonatal edition.

Quoting the literature, Lamia Soghier, M.D., Children’s NICU medical unit director, and Billie Lou Short, M.D., chief of Children’s Division of Neonatology, write that hospitals with strong performance-improvement programs share eight critical factors in common:

  • Strong performance-improvement leadership at the administrative and executive levels
  • Boards of Trustees who are actively involved and provide continuity in vision regardless of changes in senior hospital leadership
  • An effective oversight structure that avoids duplicating efforts
  • Expert performance-improvement staff who are trained in quality and safety and able to carry out projects successfully
  • Physicians who are involved and held accountable
  • Staff who are actively involved
  • Effective use of data in decision-making
  • Effective communication strategies for all stakeholders

The “‘secret sauce’ may lie in establishing systems that promote the culture of quality and safety rather than waiting for a reduction in morbidity,” write Drs. Soghier and Short.

For the second year running, Children’s neonatology division ranked No. 1 among NICUs ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Despite challenges inherent in being a “busy level IV NICU in a free-standing children’s hospital with a rapidly growing capacity, higher levels of complex patients, [the] presence of trainees on rounds and routine 3:1 and 2:1 staffing models,” Children’s NICU has continued to have the lowest rates of such objective quality measures as central line-associated bloodstream infections and unintended extubations, they write.

“We attribute our success to direct involvement of all levels of leadership in our unit in [performance improvement] PI initiatives, a dedicated local PI team, quality trained medical unit director, engagement of front-line staff in PI, the presence of local subject-matter experts, multidisciplinary diverse team both within the NICU and with other departments that bring an array of experiences and opinions and a supportive data infrastructure through local information technology, and use of the Children’s Hospital Neonatal Database that allows benchmarking to other non-delivery NICUs, Drs. Soghier and Short write. “Our team finds motivation in solving local issues routine in our work, and leadership prioritises these issues and promotes engagement of front-line staff.”

The commentary was a companion to “Using a Composite Morbidity Score and Cultural Survey to Explore Characteristics of High Proficiency Neonatal Intensive Care Units,” also published by ADC Fetal & Neonatal.

Making the grade: Children’s National is nation’s Top 5 children’s hospital

Children’s National rose in rankings to become the nation’s Top 5 children’s hospital according to the 2018-19 Best Children’s Hospitals Honor Roll released June 26, 2018, by U.S. News & World Report. Additionally, for the second straight year, Children’s Neonatology division led by Billie Lou Short, M.D., ranked No. 1 among 50 neonatal intensive care units ranked across the nation.

Children’s National also ranked in the Top 10 in six additional services:

For the eighth year running, Children’s National ranked in all 10 specialty services, which underscores its unwavering commitment to excellence, continuous quality improvement and unmatched pediatric expertise throughout the organization.

“It’s a distinct honor for Children’s physicians, nurses and employees to be recognized as the nation’s Top 5 pediatric hospital. Children’s National provides the nation’s best care for kids and our dedicated physicians, neonatologists, surgeons, neuroscientists and other specialists, nurses and other clinical support teams are the reason why,” says Kurt Newman, M.D., Children’s President and CEO. “All of the Children’s staff is committed to ensuring that our kids and families enjoy the very best health outcomes today and for the rest of their lives.”

The excellence of Children’s care is made possible by our research insights and clinical innovations. In addition to being named to the U.S. News Honor Roll, a distinction awarded to just 10 children’s centers around the nation, Children’s National is a two-time Magnet® designated hospital for excellence in nursing and is a Leapfrog Group Top Hospital. Children’s ranks seventh among pediatric hospitals in funding from the National Institutes of Health, with a combined $40 million in direct and indirect funding, and transfers the latest research insights from the bench to patients’ bedsides.

“The 10 pediatric centers on this year’s Best Children’s Hospitals Honor Roll deliver exceptional care across a range of specialties and deserve to be highlighted,” says Ben Harder, chief of health analysis at U.S. News. “Day after day, these hospitals provide state-of-the-art medical expertise to children with complex conditions. Their U.S. News’ rankings reflect their commitment to providing high-quality care.”

The 12th annual rankings recognize the top 50 pediatric facilities across the U.S. in 10 pediatric specialties: cancer, cardiology and heart surgery, diabetes and endocrinology, gastroenterology and gastrointestinal surgery, neonatology, nephrology, neurology and neurosurgery, orthopedics, pulmonology and urology. Hospitals received points for being ranked in a specialty, and higher-ranking hospitals receive more points. The Best Children’s Hospitals Honor Roll recognizes the 10 hospitals that received the most points overall.

This year’s rankings will be published in the U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Hospitals 2019” guidebook, available for purchase in late September.

child in wheelchair with mom

Potential to replace race as a risk factor for kidney-transplant failure

child in wheelchair with mom

Right now, more than 100,000 adult and pediatric patients in the U.S. are waiting for a life-saving kidney donation. Thirteen of them die each day while awaiting a transplant. However, a significant portion of kidneys from deceased donors are discarded because they literally don’t make the grade – a scoring system known as the kidney donor profile index (KDPI) that aims to predict how long a donor kidney will last in an intended recipient based on a variety of factors, including the donor’s age, size and health history.

Ethnicity and race are also part of that scoring system, explains Marva Moxey-Mims, M.D., FASN, chief of the Division of Nephrology at Children’s National Health System. That’s partly because research over the years has suggested that kidneys from certain racial groups, including African-Americans, may not have the same longevity as those from other groups.

But race might not be the right marker to consider, Dr. Moxey-Mims counters. More recent studies have shown that a particular gene known as APOL1 might better predict risk of kidney-transplant failure. APOL1 high-risk variants are associated with a wide range of kidney diseases, with retrospective studies suggesting that they could be a key cause of failure in some donated kidneys. Although this gene is found almost exclusively in people of recent African descent, only about 13 percent of that population has high-risk APOL1 variants that might cause kidney problems.

“Instead of putting all African-American donor kidneys in one proverbial ‘bucket,’ we might be able to use this gene to determine if they truly carry a higher risk of early failure,” Dr. Moxey-Mims says.

To more definitively confirm whether this gene could be used as a proxy for heightened kidney-failure risk, Dr. Moxey-Mims and colleagues across the country are participating in the APOL1 Long-Term Kidney Transplantation Outcomes Network (APOLLO) study, she and Dr. Barry Freedman explain in a perspective published online April 27, 2018, in Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. The APOLLO study will tap people accessing the hundreds of transplant centers scattered across the nation, prospectively genotyping deceased and living African-American kidney donors as well as kidney-transplant recipients to assess whether they carry high-risk APOL1 gene variants. Living donors and transplant recipients will be followed for years to gauge how their kidneys fare over time.

The researchers, Dr. Moxey-Mims explains, hope to answer whether the APOL1 high-risk gene variants in donor kidneys could replace race as a risk factor when calculating the KDPI score and whether recipients’ own APOL1 gene variants impact transplant failure risk. They also hope to better understand the risk to living donors. “If a living donor has an increased risk of kidney failure,” she adds, “he or she can make a more educated decision about whether to donate a kidney.”

Dr. Moxey-Mims plays a pivotal role as the chair of the study’s steering committee, a group made up of the study’s principal investigators at all 13 clinical sites and the Data Coordinating Center, as well as the program officials from the National Institutes of Health funding institutes (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities). She will play a key part in helping to ensure that the study stays on track with recruitment goals, as well as publicizing the study at national meetings.

The study also includes a Community Advisory Council, a group made up of stakeholders in this study: 26 African-Americans who either have donated a kidney, received a kidney donation, are on dialysis awaiting a kidney transplant, or have a close relative in one of those categories. This group has helped to steer the study design in multiple ways, Dr. Moxey-Mims explains. For example, they have worked with study leaders to simplify the language on consent forms, helped to delineate which data study participants might want to receive when the study is completed, and helped to publicize the study in their communities by giving talks at churches and other venues.

Eventually, Dr. Moxey-Mims says APOLLO study researchers hope that clarifying the role of the APOL1 gene in kidney-transplant failure could lead to fewer discarded kidneys, which could boost the number of available kidneys for patients awaiting transplants.

“Down the road, the pool of patients awaiting transplant might have access to more kidneys because available organs aren’t getting a bad score simply because the donor is African-American,” she says. “We hope this might shorten the wait for some patients and their families who are desperate to get that call that a kidney is finally available.”

Financial support for research reported in the post was provided by the National Institutes of Health under grant numbers R01 DK084149, R01 DK070941 and U01 DK116041.

An-Massaro

Keeping an eye on autonomic function for infants with HIE

An-Massaro

“By including heart rate variability measurements and other markers of autonomic function in our current predictive armamentarium,” says An Massaro, M.D., “we may be able to offer new hope for infants with HIE.”

In about two to three in every 1,000 full-term births, babies develop a neurological condition called hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) when their brains receive insufficient oxygen. HIE can be a devastating condition, leading to severe developmental or cognitive delays or motor impairments that become more evident as the child grows older. Despite improvements in care – including therapeutic hypothermia, a whole-body cooling method administered shortly after birth that can slow brain damage – about half of children with this condition die from neurological complications by age 2.

Finding ways to identify children with the most severe HIE could help researchers focus their efforts and provide even more intense neuroprotective care, explains An Massaro, M.D., a neonatologist at Children’s National Health System. But thus far, it’s been unclear which symptoms reflect the extent of HIE-induced brain damage.

That’s why Dr. Massaro and colleagues embarked on a study published in the May 2018 issue of Journal of Pediatrics. The team sought to determine whether dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) – the auto-pilot part of the nervous system responsible for unconscious bodily functions, such as breathing and digestion – reflected in routine care events can be used as a marker for brain injury severity.

The researchers collected data from 25 infants who were treated for HIE with therapeutic hypothermia at Children’s National. Thanks to multi-modal monitoring, these babies’ medical records hold a treasure trove of information, explains Rathinaswamy B. Govindan, Ph.D., a staff scientist in Children’s Advanced Physiological Signals Processing Lab.

In addition to including continuous heart rate tracings and blood pressure readings that are standard for many infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), they also recorded cerebral near infrared spectroscopy, a monitor that measures brain tissue oxygen levels. The investigators performed detailed analyses to evaluate how these monitor readings change in response to a variety of routine care events, such as diaper changes, heel sticks, endotracheal tube manipulations and pupil examinations.

The researchers stratified these infants based on how dysfunctional their ANS behaved by using heart rate variability as a marker: The fewer natural fluctuations in heart rate, the more damaged their ANS was thought to be. And they also used non-invasive brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to determine brain damage. They then compared this information with the babies’ physiological responses during each care event.

Their findings show that infants with impaired ANS, based on depressed heart rate variability before the care event, had significantly different responses to these care events compared with babies with intact ANS.

  • For stimulating interventions, such as diaper changes and heel sticks, both heart rate and blood pressure increased in babies with intact ANS but decreased in babies with impaired ones.
  • Shining a light in their pupils led to an expected decreased heart rate with stable blood pressure in ANS-intact infants, but in ANS-impaired infants, there was no responsive change in heart rate and, additionally, a decrease in blood pressure was observed.
  • Responses were similar between the two groups during breathing tube manipulations, except for a slight increase in heart rate a few minutes later in the ANS-impaired group.

These results, Govindan explains, suggest that a real-time, continuous way to assess ANS function may offer insights into the expected physiological response for a given infant during routine NICU care.

“This is exactly the type of additional information that intensivists need to pinpoint infants who may benefit from additional neuroprotective support,” he says. “Right now, it is standard practice to monitor brain activity continuously using electroencephalogram and to check the status of the brain using MRI to assess the response to therapeutic cooling. Neither of these assessments can be readily used by neonatologists at the bedside in real-time to make clinical decisions.”

Assessing ANS function in real-time can help guide neuroprotective care in high-risk newborns by providing insight into the evolving nature of brain damage in these infants, Dr. Massaro adds.

Beyond simply serving as a biomarker into brain injury, poor ANS function also could contribute to the development of secondary injury in newborns with HIE by stymieing the normal changes in heart rate and blood pressure that help oxygenate and heal injured brains. The researchers found that the cumulative duration of autonomic impairment was significantly correlated with the severity of brain injury visible by MRI in this group of infants.

“By including heart rate variability measurements and other markers of autonomic function in our current predictive armamentarium,” says Dr. Massaro, “we may be able to offer new hope for infants with HIE.”

In addition to Dr. Massaro, the Senior Author, study co-authors include Lead Author, Heather Campbell, M.D.; Rathinaswamy B. Govindan, Ph.D., Children’s Advanced Physiological Signals Processing Lab; Srinivas Kota, Ph.D.; Tareq Al-Shargabi, M.S.; Marina Metzler, B.S.; Nickie Andescavage, M.D., Children’s neonatalogist; Taeun Chang, M.D., Children’s neonatal and fetal neurologist; L. Gilbert Vezina, M.D., attending in Children’s Division of Diagnostic Imaging and Radiology; and Adré J. du Plessis, M.B.Ch.B., M.P.H., chief of Children’s Division of Fetal and Transitional Medicine.

This research was supported by the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Children’s National under awards UL1TR000075 and 1KL2RR031987-01 and the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Consortium within the National Institutes of Health under award P30HD040677.

Baby in the NICU

Getting to the heart of cardiac output

Baby in the NICU

To keep infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) as healthy as possible, it’s important to keep close tabs on their vital signs. During their NICU stay, most babies have continuous monitoring of their blood pressure, respiratory rate and blood oxygen saturation. And although continuous monitoring of heart rate is also typically standard, other information about heart function – such as cardiac output, a measure of how well the heart is pumping blood – remains a challenge to obtain in these vulnerable babies.

Clinical markers like blood pressure, heart rate and urine output are available, but they are indirect measures of cardiac output, how much blood the heart pumps per minute. Less invasive techniques, such as Doppler ultrasound, can be imprecise. Respiratory mass spectrometry or catheterization would provide more precision by directly calculating cardiac output but carry risks or are not feasible for neonates.

Clinicians at Children’s National Health System hypothesized that COstatus monitors could offer a way to directly measure cardiac output among neonates. The COstatus monitor – a minimally invasive way to measure hemodynamics – captures cardiac output, total end diastolic volume, active circulation volume and central blood volume.

The research team tested the approach by leveraging ultrasound dilution: Injecting saline, which has an ultrasound velocity of 1533m/second, slows the ultrasound velocity of blood from its normal rate of 1580m/second and produces a dilution curve.

“It is feasible to directly measure neonatal cardiac output by ultrasound dilution via the COstatus monitor in the first two weeks of life with no adverse events,” says Khodayar Rais-Bahrami, M.D., a Children’s neonatologist and senior author for the research presented during the Pediatric Academic Societies 2018 annual meeting. “When we took consecutive measurements, we saw very little variance in the parameters.”

The COstatus monitor uses an extracorporeal loop that is connected to arterial and venous catheters. The 12 neonates included in the study already had umbilical venous catheters as well as either a peripheral arterial line or umbilical arterial catheter. The infants ranged in weight from 0.72 to 3.74 kg and were born at 24 to 41.3 gestational weeks.

The infants’ cardiac output was measured 54 times from 1 to 13 days of life. Up to two measurement sessions occurred daily for a maximum of four days. The mean cardiac output was 0.43 L/minute with a mean cardiac index of 197mL/kg/minute.

Future research will describe normal cardiac output ranges for neonates as well as how these measurements evolve during the first week of life.

In addition to Dr. Rais-Bahrami, study co-authors include Simranjeet S. Sran, M.D., and Mariam Said, M.D., a Children’s neonatologist.

Preemie Baby

Brain food for preemies

Preemie Baby

Babies born prematurely – before 37 weeks of pregnancy – often have a lot of catching up to do. Not just in size. Preterm infants typically lag behind their term peers in a variety of areas as they grow up, including motor development, behavior and school performance.

New research suggests one way to combat this problem. The study, led by Children’s researchers and presented during the Pediatric Academic Societies 2018 annual meeting, suggests that the volume of carbohydrates, proteins, lipids and calories consumed by very vulnerable premature infants significantly contributes to increased brain volume and white matter development, even though additional research is needed to determine specific nutritional approaches that best support these infants’ developing brains.

During the final weeks of pregnancy, the fetal brain undergoes an unprecedented growth spurt, dramatically increasing in volume as well as structural complexity as the fetus approaches full term.

One in 10 infants born in the U.S. in 2016 was born before 37 weeks of gestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Within this group, very low birthweight preemies are at significant risk for growth failure and neurocognitive impairment. Nutritional support in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) helps to encourage optimal brain development among preterm infants. However, their brain growth rates still lag behind those seen in full-term newborns.

“Few studies have investigated the impact of early macronutrient and caloric intake on microstructural brain development in vulnerable preterm infants,” says Katherine Ottolini, lead author of the Children’s-led study. “Advanced quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques may help to fill that data gap in order to better direct targeted interventions to newborns who are most in need.”

The research team at Children’s National Health System enrolled 69 infants who were born younger than 32 gestational weeks and weighed less than 1,500 grams. The infants’ mean birth weight was 970 grams and their mean gestational age at birth was 27.6 weeks.

The newborns underwent MRI at their term-equivalent age, 40 weeks gestation. Parametric maps were generated for fractional anisotropy in regions of the cerebrum and cerebellum for diffusion tensor imaging analyses, which measures brain connectivity and white matter tract integrity. The research team also tracked nutritional data: Grams per kilogram of carbohydrates, proteins, lipids and overall caloric intake.

“We found a significantly negative association between fractional anisotropy and cumulative macronutrient/caloric intake,” says Catherine Limperopoulos, Ph.D., director of Children’s Developing Brain Research Laboratory and senior author of the research. “Curiously, we also find significantly negative association between macronutrient/caloric intake and regional brain volume in the cortical and deep gray matter, cerebellum and brainstem.”

Because the nutritional support does contribute to cerebral volumes and white matter microstructural development in very vulnerable newborns, Limperopoulos says the significant negative associations seen in this study may reflect the longer period of time these infants relied on nutritional support in the NICU.

In addition to Ottolini and Limperopoulos, study co-authors include Nickie Andescavage, M.D., Attending, Children’s Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine; and Kushal Kapse.

Nikki Gillum Posnack

Examining BPA’s impact on developing heart cells

Nikki Gillum Posnack

“We know that once this chemical enters the body, it can be bioactive and therefore can influence how heart cells function,” says Nikki Gillum Posnack, Ph.D. “This is the first study to look at the impact BPA exposure can have on heart cells that are still developing.”

More than 8 million pounds of bisphenol A (BPA), a common chemical used in manufacturing plastics, is produced each year for consumer goods and medical products. This endocrine disruptor reaches 90 percent of the population, and excessive exposure to BPA, e.g., plastic bottles, cash register receipts, and even deodorant, is associated with adverse cardiovascular events that range from heart arrhythmias and angina to atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the U.S.

To examine the impact BPA could have in children, researchers with Children’s National Heart Institute and the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation evaluated the short-term risks of BPA exposure in a preclinical setting. This experimental research finds developing heart cells respond to short-term BPA exposure with slowed heart rates, irregular heart rhythms and calcium instabilities.

While more research is needed to provide clinical recommendations, this preclinical model paves the way for future study designs to see if young patients exposed to BPA from medical devices or surgical procedures have adverse cardiac events and altered cardiac function.

“Existing research explores the impact endocrine disruptors, specifically BPA, have on adults and their cardiovascular and kidney function,” notes Nikki Gillum Posnack, Ph.D., a study author and assistant professor at Children’s National and The George Washington University. “We know that once this chemical enters the body, it can be bioactive and therefore can influence how heart cells function. This is the first study to look at the impact BPA exposure can have on heart cells that are still developing.”

The significance of this research is that plastics have revolutionized the way clinicians and surgeons treat young patients, especially patients with compromised immune or cardiac function.

Implications of Dr. Posnack’s future research may incentivize the development of alternative products used by medical device manufacturers and encourage the research community to study the impact of plastics on sensitive patient populations.

“It’s too early to tell how this research will impact the development of medical devices and equipment used in intensive care settings,” notes Dr. Posnack. “We do not want to interfere with clinical treatments, but, as scientists, we are curious about how medical products and materials can be improved. We are extending this research right now by examining the impact of short-term BPA exposure on human heart cells, which are developed from stem cells.”

This research, which appears as an online advance in Nature’s Scientific Reports, was supported by the National Institutes of Health under awards R00ES023477, RO1HL139472 and UL1TR000075, Children’s Research Institute and the Children’s National Heart Institute. NVIDIA Corporation provided GPUs, computational devices, for this study.

inhaler

Keeping kids with asthma out of the hospital

inhaler

Pediatric asthma takes a heavy toll on patients and families alike. Affecting more than 7 million children in the U.S., it’s the most common nonsurgical diagnosis for pediatric hospital admission, with costs of more than $570 million annually. Understanding how to care for these young patients has significantly improved in the last several decades, leading the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to issue evidence-based guidelines on pediatric asthma in 1990. Despite knowing more about this respiratory ailment, overall morbidity – measured by attack rates, pediatric emergency department visits or hospitalizations – has not decreased over the last decade.

“We know how to effectively treat pediatric asthma,” says Kavita Parikh, M.D., M.S.H.S., a pediatric hospitalist at Children’s National Health System. “There’s been a huge investment in terms of quality improvements that’s reflected in how many papers there are about this topic in the literature.”

However, Dr. Parikh notes, most of those quality-improvement papers do not focus on inpatient discharge, a particularly vulnerable time for patients. Up to 40 percent of children who are hospitalized for asthma-related concerns come back through the emergency department within one year. One-quarter of those kids are readmitted.

“It’s clear that we need to do better at keeping kids with asthma out of the hospital. The point at which they’re being discharged might be an effective time to intervene,” Dr. Parikh adds.

To determine which interventions hold promise, Dr. Parikh and colleagues recently performed a systematic review of studies involving quality improvements after inpatient discharge. They published their findings in the May 2018 edition of the journal, Pediatrics. Because May is National Asthma and Allergy Awareness month, she adds, it’s a timely fit.

The researchers combed the literature, looking for research that tested various interventions at the point of discharge for their effect on hospital readmission anywhere from fewer than 30 days after discharge to up to one year later. They specifically searched for papers published from 1991, the year after the NIH issued its original asthma care guidelines, until November 2016.

Their search netted 30 articles that met these criteria. A more thorough review of each of these studies revealed common themes to interventions implemented at discharge:

  • Nine studies focused on standardization of care, such as introducing or revising a specific clinical pathway
  • Nine studies focused on education, such as teaching patients and their families better self-management strategies
  • Five studies focused on tools for discharge planning, such as ensuring kids had medications in-hand at the time of discharge or assigning a case manager to navigate barriers to care and
  • Seven studies looked at the effect of multimodal interventions that combined any of these themes.

When Dr. Parikh and colleagues examined the effects of each type of intervention on hospital readmission, they came to a stunning conclusion: No single category of intervention seemed to have any effect. Only multimodal interventions that combined multiple categories were effective at reducing the risk of readmission between 30 days and one year after initial discharge.

“It’s indicative of what we have personally seen in quality-improvement efforts here at Children’s National,” Dr. Parikh says. “With a complex condition like asthma, it’s difficult for a single change in how this disease is managed to make a big difference. We need complex and multimodal programs to improve pediatric asthma outcomes, particularly when there’s a transfer of care like when patients are discharged and return home.”

One intervention that showed promise in their qualitative analysis of these studies, Dr. Parikh adds, is ensuring patients are discharged with medications in hand—a strategy that also has been examined at Children’s National. In Children’s focus groups, patients and their families have spoken about how having medications with them when they leave the hospital can boost compliance in taking them and avoid difficulties is getting to an outside pharmacy after discharge. Sometimes, they have said, the chaos of returning home can stymie efforts to stay on track with care, despite their best efforts. Anything that can ease that burden may help improve outcomes, Dr. Parikh says.

“We’re going to need to try many different strategies to reduce readmission rates, engaging different stakeholders in the inpatient and outpatient side,” she adds. “There’s a lot of room for improvement.”

In addition to Dr. Parikh, study co-authors include Susan Keller, MLS, MS-HIT, Children’s National; and Shawn Ralston, M.D., M.Sc., Children’s Hospital of Dartmouth-Hitchcock.

Funding for this work was provided by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) under grant K08HS024554. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of AHRQ.

Brian Stone with baby

Collaborative approach to NICU care leads to improved quality and safety across hospitals

Brian Stone with baby

Parents with sick or premature newborns want and need the best care possible, making quality and safety in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) a top priority. Over the past decade, Children’s National Health System has provided top quality NICU care to the Washington, D.C. community and surrounding areas. As part of this commitment, the institution developed an extensive network of partnerships in the Mid-Atlantic region where Children’s National neonatologists and advanced practice providers collaborate with other hospitals in the region to share best practices in the NICU.

Together, Children’s National and partner hospitals aim to improve NICU care for patients and families. To carry out this commitment, Children’s National neonatologists fully integrate themselves into local community hospitals to provide services such as neonatal care, delivery room attendance, consultations to obstetricians and local pediatricians, and serve as educators to the hospital team.

Integrating pediatric specialists into community hospitals that treat both adults and children helps strengthen the infrastructure and refine practices to specifically understand pediatric biology and development to enhance existing care. Using the Dyad leadership model, the team forms interdisciplinary care committees, led by a physician and nursing champion, to empower everyone who interacts with the NICU and has a stake in a child’s care. All policies and procedures are vetted by these committees to ensure high-quality, cohesive care for the patient.

Through this collaboration, Children’s National neonatologists oversee newborn care for more than 10,000 births per year. Outcomes include:

  • Partner NICUs consistently perform in the top quartile for key performance benchmarking measures in national networks.
  • Partner NICUs have lower than predicted rates of morbidity, infection, lung disease and necrotizing enterocolitis which are major determinants in overall neonatal outcome.

Based on this success, Children’s National created the Division of Pediatric Outreach in 2017, led by Brian Stone, M.D., M.B.A. This division focuses on ensuring that neonatal and pediatric patients have access to and can receive expert care from Children’s National specialists in their local community birth hospital. Additionally, the division works closely with local obstetricians and maternal-fetal-medicine specialists to develop birth and post-natal plans for high-risk pregnancies to ensure that newborns have the best possible start.

“Over the years, we have been able to leverage our internal expertise as reflected in our current number one ranking in U.S. News & World Report and extend the same high level of care to patients born within our extended network to improve population health as a whole within the region,” said Dr. Stone.

Cara Lichtenstein

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

Cara Lichtenstein

“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.”

Research and Education Week awardees embody the diverse power of innovation

cnmc-research-education-week

“Diversity powers innovation” was brought to life at Children’s National April 16 to 20, 2018, during the eighth annual Research and Education Week. Children’s faculty were honored as President’s Award winners and for exhibiting outstanding mentorship, while more than 360 scientific poster presentations were displayed throughout the Main Atrium.

Two clinical researchers received Mentorship Awards for excellence in fostering the development of junior faculty. Lauren Kenworthy, Ph.D received the award for Translational Science and Murray M. Pollack, M.D., M.B.A., was recognized in the Clinical Science category as part of Children’s National Health System’s Research and Education Week 2018.

Dr. Kenworthy has devoted her career to improving the lives of people on the autism spectrum and was cited by former mentees as an inspirational and tireless counselor. Her mentorship led to promising new lines of research investigating methods for engaging culturally diverse families in autism studies, as well as the impact of dual language exposure on cognition in autism.

Meanwhile, Dr. Pollack was honored for his enduring focus on motivating early-career professionals to investigate outcomes in pediatric critical care, emergency medicine and neonatology. Dr. Pollack is one of the founders of the Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network. He developed PRISM 1 and 2, which has revolutionized pediatric intensive care by providing a methodology to predict mortality and outcome using standardly collected clinical data. Mentees credit Dr. Pollack with helping them develop critical thinking skills and encouraging them to address creativity and focus in their research agenda.

In addition to the Mentorship and President’s Awards, 34 other Children’s National faculty, residents, interns and research staff were among the winners of Poster Presentation awards. The event is a celebration of the commitment to improving pediatric health in the form of education, research, scholarship and innovation that occurs every day at Children’s National.

Children’s Research Institute (CRI) served as host for the week’s events to showcase the breadth of research and education programs occurring within the entire health system, along with the rich demographic and cultural origins of the teams that make up Children’s National. The lineup of events included scientific poster presentations, as well as a full slate of guest lectures, educational workshops and panel discussions.

“It’s critical that we provide pathways for young people of all backgrounds to pursue careers in science and medicine,” says Vittorio Gallo, Ph.D., Children’s chief research officer and CRI’s scientific director. “In an accelerated global research and health care environment, internationalization of innovation requires an understanding of cultural diversity and inclusion of different mindsets and broader spectrums of perspectives and expertise from a wide range of networks,” Gallo adds.

“Here at Children’s National we want our current and future clinician-researchers to reflect the patients we serve, which is why our emphasis this year was on harnessing diversity and inclusion as tools to power innovation,” says Mark L. Batshaw, M.D., physician-in-chief and chief academic officer of Children’s National.

“Research and Education Week 2018 presented a perfect opportunity to celebrate the work of our diverse research, education and care teams, who have come together to find innovative solutions by working with local, national and international partners. This event highlights the ingenuity and inspiration that our researchers contribute to our mission of healing children,” Dr. Batshaw concludes.

Awards for the best posters were distributed according to the following categories:

  • Basic and translational science
  • Quality and performance improvement
  • Clinical research
  • Community-based research and
  • Education, training and program development.

Each winner illustrated promising advances in the development of new therapies, diagnostics and medical devices.

Diversity powers innovation: Denice Cora-Bramble, M.D., MBA
Diversity powers innovation: Vittorio Gallo, Ph.D.
Diversity powers innovation: Mark L. Batshaw, M.D.

ER Nurse

An unexpected discovery in a central line

ER Nurse

About a year and a half ago, a 6-year-old boy arrived at Children’s Emergency Department after accidently removing his own gastrointestinal feeding tube. He wasn’t a stranger to Children’s National Health System: This young patient had spent plenty of time at the hospital since birth. Diagnosed in infancy with an intestinal pseudo-obstruction, a rare condition in which his bowels acted as if there were a blockage even though one was not present, parts of his intestine died and had been removed through multiple surgeries.

Because of this issue and associated health problems, at 4 years old he had a central line placed in a large vein that leads to his heart. That replaced other central lines placed in his neck earlier after those repeatedly broke. This latest central line in his chest als0 had frequent breaks. It also had become infected with multidrug-resistant Klebsiella bacteria two years before he was treated at Children’s National for inadvertently removing his feeding tube.

On that day, he seemed otherwise well. His exam was relatively unremarkable, except for a small leak in his central line and a slight fever. Those findings triggered cultures taken both from blood flowing through his central line and the surrounding skin.

“No one expected him to grow anything from these cultures, especially from a child who looked so healthy,” explains Madan Kumar, a fellow in Children’s division of Pediatric Infectious Disease and a member of the child’s care team. But a mold grew prolifically. Further investigation from a sample sent to the National Institutes of Health showed that it was a relatively new species known as Mucor velutinosus.

Because such an infection had never been reported in a child whose immune system wasn’t extremely compromised from cancer, Kumar and team decided to publish a case report. The study appeared online Jan. 24, 2018, in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.

Kumar notes that this patient faced myriad challenges. Not only did he have a central line, but the line also had numerous problems, necessitating fixes that could increase the chance of infection. Additionally, because of his intestinal issues, he had a chronic problem with malabsorption of nutrients. Patients with this issue often are treated liberally with antibiotics. Although this intervention can kill “bad” bacteria that can cause an infection, they also knock out “good” bacteria that keep other microorganisms – like fungi – in check. On top of all of this, the patient was receiving a nutrient-rich formula in his central line to boost his caloric intake, yet another factor associated with infections.

Patients who develop this specific fungal infection are overwhelmingly adults who are immunocompromised, Kumar explains, including those with diabetes, transplant recipients, patients with cancer and those who have abnormally low concentrations of immune cells called neutrophils in their blood. The only children who tend to get this infection are preterm infants of very low birth weight who haven’t yet developed a robust immune response.

Because there was only one other published case report about a child with M. velutinosus – a 1-year-old with brain cancer who had undergone a bone marrow transplant – Kumar notes that he and colleagues were at a loss as to how best to treat their patient. “There’s a paucity of literature on what to do in a case like this,” he says.

Fortunately, the treatment they selected was successful. As soon as the cultures came back positive for this mold, the patient went on a three-week course of an antifungal drug known as amphotericin B. Surgeons also removed his infected central line and placed a new one. These efforts cured the patient’s infection and prevented it from spreading and potentially causing the multi-organ failure associated with these types of infections.

This case taught Kumar and colleagues quite a bit – knowledge that they wanted to share by publishing the case report. For example, it reinforces the importance of central line care. It also highlights the value of thoroughly investigating potential problems in a patient with risk factors, even one who appears otherwise healthy.

Finally, Kumar adds, the case emphasizes the importance of good antibiotic stewardship, which can help prevent patients from developing sometimes deadly secondary infections like this one. “This is not an organism that you see growing in a 6-year-old very often,” he says. “The fact that we saw it here speaks to the need to be judicious with broad-spectrum antibiotics so that we have a number of therapeutic options should we see unusual cases like this one.”

Shireen Atabaki

Innovative care using health IT lands Children’s National a 2017 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award

Shireen Atabaki

A new diagnostic tool led by Shireen Atabaki, M.D., M.P.H., helps prescribers determine if CT scans are necessary for children with head injuries through a checklist protocol.

Opportunities to improve the lives of children are increasingly found at the intersection of health and technology, a sweet spot for enhancing care in today’s connected world. A team of experts at Children’s National Health System launched several initiatives using health information technology to improve care delivery, earning the institution the prestigious 2017 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award. Recognizing outstanding achievements of organizations that have utilized health IT to significantly improve patient outcomes while also achieving a return on investment, Children’s National received the award based on three case studies in particular:

  • Decreasing use of CAT scans by 44 percent – A new diagnostic tool led by Shireen Atabaki, M.D., M.P.H., emergency medicine specialist, incorporated into the electronic health record helps prescribers determine if CT scans are necessary for children with head injuries through a checklist protocol. The new tool reduced the rate of CT scan utilization by 44 percent – decreasing unnecessary radiation exposure for children and resulting in first-year cost savings of more than $875,000.
  • Innovative unit-based quality boards – These electronic boards provide health care teams and families with real-time quality and safety information. By having patient information readily available in one location, the boards improved medication reconciliation by 13 percent, decreased the time to patient consent by 49 percent, and reduced duration of urinary catheters by 11 percent.
  • Improved clinician documentation – To improve outcomes and reduce costs,

Children’s National transitioned from dictation/transcription-driven notes to electronic/voice recognition notes in ambulatory specialty clinics. This allowed for the immediate availability of notes to all care providers and a significant reduction in transcription costs.

These initiatives demonstrate the life-changing quality and safety efforts under way at Children’s National that put patient safety first. Brian Jacobs, M.D., vice president, chief medical information officer and chief information officer, accepted the award on behalf of Children’s National at the HIMSS Awards gala at the Wynn in Las Vegas in March.

STAT Madness

Voters select Children’s National innovation as runner-up in national competition

STAT Madness

Facial recognition technology developed and tested by researchers with the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation and Rare Disease Institute at Children’s National was the runner-up in this year’s STAT Madness 2018 competition.

Facial recognition technology developed and tested by researchers with the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation and Rare Disease Institute at Children’s National was the runner up in this year’s STAT Madness 2018 competition. Garnering more than 33,000 overall votes in the bracket-style battle that highlights the best biomedical advances, the Children’s National entry survived five rounds and made it to the championship before falling short of East Carolina University’s overall vote count.

Children’s entry demonstrates the potential widespread utility of digital dysmorphology technology to diverse populations with genetic conditions. The tool enables doctors and clinicians to identify children with genetic conditions earlier by simply taking the child’s photo with a smartphone and having it entered into a global database for computer analyses.

The researchers partnered with the National Institutes of Health National Human Genome Research Institute and clinicians from 20 different countries to acquire pictures from local doctors for the study. Using the facial analysis technology, they compared groups of Caucasians, Africans, Asians and Latin Americans with Down syndrome, 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (also called DiGeorge syndrome) and Noonan syndrome to those without it. Based on more than 125 individual facial features, they were able to correctly identify patients with the condition from each ethnic group with more than a 93 percent accuracy rate. Missed diagnoses of genetic conditions can negatively impact quality of life and lead to premature death.

Children’s National also was among four “Editor’s Pick” finalists, entries that span a diverse range of scientific disciplines. Journalists at the digital publication STAT pored through published journal articles for 64 submissions in the single-elimination contest to honor a select group of entries that were the most creative, novel, and most likely to benefit the biomedical field and the general public.

Each year, 1 million children are born worldwide with a genetic condition that requires immediate attention. Because many of these children experience serious medical complications and go on to suffer from intellectual disability, it is critical that doctors accurately diagnose genetic syndromes as early as possible.

“For years, research groups have viewed facial recognition technology as a potent tool to aid genetic diagnosis. Our project is unique because it offers the expertise of a virtual geneticist to general health care providers located anywhere in the world,” says Marius George Linguraru, D.Phil., M.A., M.S., a Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation principal investigator who invented the technology. “Right now, children born in under-resourced regions of the U.S. or the world can wait years to receive an accurate diagnosis due to the lack of specialized genetic expertise in that region.”

In addition to providing patient-specific benefits, Marshall Summar, M.D., director of Children’s Rare Disease Institute that partners in the facial recognition technology research, says the project offers a wider societal benefit.

“Right now, parents can endure a seemingly endless odyssey as they struggle to understand why their child is different from peers,” says Dr. Summar. “A timely genetic diagnosis can dispel that uncertainty and replace it with knowledge that can speed patient triage and deliver timely medical interventions.”

Zeroing in on Zero Harm

Zeroing in on zero harm: Innovative quality and safety initiatives from Children’s National experts

Zeroing in on Zero Harm

Leaders at Children’s National Health System recently showcased innovative quality and safety initiatives on a national stage at the Children’s Hospital Association’s 2018 Quality and Safety in Children’s Health Conference.

Leaders at Children’s National Health System recently showcased innovative quality and safety initiatives on a national stage at the Children’s Hospital Association’s 2018 Quality and Safety in Children’s Health Conference. While collaborating with other medical professionals in the field, the team made an impact by sharing key projects implemented at Children’s National to enhance patient care and reduce harm, including:

    • Safety in Numbers: Driving 10,000 Good Catches – Presented by Rahul Shah, M.D., vice president, chief quality and safety officer, and Rebecca Cady, Esq, BSN, vice president, chief risk officer: Recognizing barriers to reporting safety events, Children’s National embarked upon a three-year corporate goal to double the number of safety event reports, ultimately leading to reduction of preventable harm. By promoting staff accountability and using incentives to drive reporting, incident reports more than doubled in a three-year time frame.
    • Moving from Disjointed Spreadsheets to a Real-Time Data Management System – Presented by Evan Hochberg, R.N., patient safety consultant, and Neil Bhattarai, C.S.T., process improvement consultant: Tracking hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) requires robust data capabilities, which is why Children’s National sought to improve its HAC data system with increased efficiencies and reduced delays in how staff presented data to the hospital. The team recognized opportunities to improve the management of HAC data, leading to the finding that increased real-time awareness of harm events while utilizing existing infrastructure can accelerate harm reduction.
    • Improving the Surgical Experience for Children with Autism – Presented by Terry Spearman, C.C.L.S., manager of child life services: Staff at Children’s National found that many patients with autism entering the operating room needed special support to make it through pre-op, complicating their path toward surgery and causing frustration for patients, families and the care team. The team solved this challenge by creating a system to identify patients before they arrived for surgery, which allowed staff to create a safe passage plan for each patient and to achieve better care coordination with all care team members. Titled “Help Me Keep Calm,” the hospital’s program provides a more peaceful and individualized experience for both the patient and his or her family.
    • IMPACT Session: Enhancing Psychological Safety to Improve the Safety Climate – Presented by Rahul Shah, M.D., vice president, chief quality and safety officer; Evan Hochberg, R.N., patient safety consultant; and Kathryn Jacobsen, R.N., director of patient safety: Psychological safety around event reporting is a crucial element of safety culture and the ability to voice concerns without reprisal leads to the ideal safe environment.
baby in arms

Breast-feeding, anesthesia and analgesics: What’s safe?

baby in arms

Breast-feeding is safe even just after moms have woken from anesthesia or while they take most pain medications, says Sarah Reece-Stremtan, M.D., lead author of an expanded protocol about the topic.

Moms can safely continue breast-feeding even just after waking from anesthesia and while taking most pain medications, according to a newly expanded clinical guidance, “Clinical Protocol No. 15: Analgesia and Anesthesia for the Breastfeeding Mother,” from the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine (ABM).

In general, mothers who are beyond the postpartum stage do not need to avoid breast-feeding or to pump and discard breast milk while taking analgesics or receiving local or general anesthesia. The protocol was published in the journal Breastfeeding Medicine.

Sarah Reece-Stremtan, M.D., an anesthesiologist and acute pain medicine specialist at Children’s National Health System, co-chairs ABM’s protocol committee and is the lead author of the expanded protocol. A specialist in the intersection of anesthesia, pain medicine and breast-feeding medicine, Dr. Reece-Stremtan led the drafting of the recommendations.

“The key recommendation in this protocol is after waking up from anesthesia, most moms can breast-feed right away,” says Dr. Reece-Stremtan. “The standard thinking has been ‘pump and dump’ – discarding the breast milk for 24 hours after anesthesia. As an outdated practice, it is not evidence-based and is potentially harmful for babies. The evidence shows that this breast milk is safe.”

The authors’ main note of caution relates to opioids: “The most concerning class of medications used for anesthesia and analgesia in breast-feeding mothers is opioids, as these medications transfer into breast milk,” they write. “Judicious use of opioids for short periods is likely to be safe for most breast-feeding mothers and infants.”

The protocol recommendations cover pain medications, brief procedures, regional and general anesthesia and perioperative considerations. They provide more granular detail about specific anesthesia and analgesic agents.

For each recommendation, the protocol notes the strength or weakness of the evidence base. The authors note there is little rigorous information in the scientific literature about anesthesia or procedural sedation in breast-feeding mothers.

“For obvious reasons, it is unethical to conduct randomized, controlled clinical trials for this area, so we rely on expert opinion and on observational studies that do exist,” says Dr. Reece-Stremtan.

The protocol is intended to be relevant to a broad range of medical fields, from anesthesiology to general pediatrics, and to help any physician who may care for a new mother.

For instance, it includes a perioperative plan with suggestions that surgeons or physicians can share with their patients to make things easier for a breast-feeding mom who needs local or general anesthesia – and safer for their babies. “It’s important to acknowledge that medication isn’t the only or even the most important thing,” says Dr. Reece-Stremtan. Tips to aid breast-feeding can ease the minds of mothers and their physicians alike.

Dr. Reece-Stremtan has long been interested in breast-feeding and has seen a need for more education about where her areas of expertise, pediatric anesthesia and pain medicine, intersect. Few physicians specialize in this area, so she often gives talks to other clinicians on the topic.

“I know that most anesthesiologists do not encounter this scenario often, so many have questions about the impact of anesthesia agents on breast-feeding,” says Dr. Reece-Stremtan. “Likewise, general pediatricians, neonatal specialists and other health professionals who care for moms and newborns may have limited knowledge about the safety of pain medicine or anesthesia for breast-feeding infants.”

In developing this new set of recommendations, ABM’s protocol committee aimed to provide practical clinical guidance for two scenarios: Postpartum, and moms and babies who are past that stage. The committee divided a previous ABM protocol into these two areas and expanded them to offer clinicians more complete guidance that is clinically relevant yet concise. Dr. Reece-Stremtan attributes this expansion to a growing appreciation of the importance of breast-feeding to both individual and public health. She is helping to finalize ABM’s new birth-postpartum protocol on anesthesia and analgesics, which will be published in early 2018.

To build on these protocols, Dr. Reece-Stremtan is helping the Academy develop a set of free patient education materials that will inform mothers about the use of pain medications or the need for anesthesia while breast-feeding, so they can feel at ease that they are doing the best thing for their baby’s health.

Kavita Parikh

Discharge strategies to prevent asthma readmissions

“Improving how we care for children who are hospitalized with asthma includes preparing them for a successful return home with the best tools to manage their illness and prevent a future hospital visit,” says Kavita Parikh, M.D., M.S.H.S.

Readmission rates at three months for kids hospitalized for acute asthma dropped when families received comprehensive education prior to discharge, the only single component of discharge bundles that was strongly associated with lowered readmissions, finds a multicenter retrospective cohort study published online Feb. 1, 2018, in The Journal of Pediatrics.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asthma is the most common chronic lung disease of childhood, affecting roughly 6 million U.S. children. Hospitalization for asthma accounts for $1.5 billion in annual hospital charges and represents almost one-third of childhood asthma costs.

Children who are hospitalized for asthma have a roughly 20 percent chance of returning to the hospital in the next year, and individual hospital readmission rates can range from 5.7 percent to 9.1 percent at three months, writes the study team. While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has published evidence-based guidelines for discharge planning, there is no single, standardized asthma discharge process used across all pediatric hospitals in the U.S. that impacts 30-day readmission rates.

“Improving how we care for children who are hospitalized with asthma includes preparing them for a successful return home with the best tools to manage their illness and prevent a future hospital visit,” says Kavita Parikh, M.D., M.S.H.S., an associate professor of pediatrics at Children’s National Health System and lead study author. “Our study underscores the importance of increasing the intensity of select discharge components. For example, ensuring that children hospitalized for asthma receive asthma medication at discharge along with comprehensive education and environmental mitigation may reduce asthma readmissions.”

The study team analyzed records from a national sample of tertiary care children’s hospitals, looking at hospitalizations of 5- to 17-year-olds for acute asthma exacerbation during the 2015 calendar year. They characterized how frequently hospitals used 13 separate asthma discharge components by distributing an electronic survey to quality leaders. Forty-five of 49 hospitals (92 percent) completed the survey.

The 45 hospitals recorded a median of 349 asthma discharges per year and had a median adjusted readmission rate of 2.6 percent at 30 days and a 6.6 percent median adjusted readmission rate at three months. The most commonly used discharge components employed for children with asthma were having a dedicated person providing education (76 percent), providing a spacer at discharge (67 percent) and communicating with a primary medical doctor (58 percent).

Discharge components that were trending toward reduced readmission rates at three months include:

  • Comprehensive asthma education, including having dedicated asthma educators
  • Medications and devices provided to patients at discharge, such as spacers, beta-agonists, controller medication and oral steroids
  • Communication and scheduled appointments with a primary medical doctor
  • Post-discharge activities, including home visits and referrals for environmental mitigation programs.

“In addition to being aligned with NIH asthma recommendations, connecting the family with a primary care provider after discharge helps to improve patients’ timely access to care if symptoms recur when they return home,” Dr. Parikh adds. “Bundling these discharge components may offer multiple opportunities to educate patients and families and to employ a range of communication styles such as didactic, visual and interactive.”

Study co-authors include Matt Hall, Ph.D., Children’s Hospital Association; Chén C. Kenyon, M.D., M.S.H.P., The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; Ronald J. Teufel II, M.D., M.S.C.R., Medical University of South Carolina; Grant M. Mussman, M.D., M.H.S.A. and Samir S. Shah, M.D., M.S.C.E., Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Amanda Montalbano, M.D., M.P.H., Children’s Mercy; Jessica Gold, M.D., M.S., Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford; James W. Antoon, M.D., Children’s Hospital; Anupama Subramony, M.D., Cohen Children’s Medical Center; Vineeta Mittal, M.D., M.B.A. and Rustin B. Morse, M.D., Children’s Health; and Karen M. Wilson, M.D., M.P.H., Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Research reported in this post was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, K08HS024554.

NPosnack-Heart-image

NIH funding to improve devices and safeguard cardiovascular health

Nearly 15 million blood transfusions are performed each year in the U.S., and pediatric patients alone receive roughly 425,000 transfused units. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, such as bisphenol A and di-2-ethylhexyl-phthalate (DEHP), can leach from some plastic devices used in such transfusions. However, it remains unclear how many complications following a transfusion can be attributed to the interplay between local and systemic reactions to these chemical contaminants.

NPosnack-Heart-image

Top: Live, excised heart that is being perfused with a crystalloid buffer via the aorta. The heart is stained with a voltage-sensitive fluorescent dye, which is excited by an LED light source. Bottom, right: Cardiac action potentials are optically mapped across the epicardial surface in real-time by monitoring changes in the fluorescence signal that are proportional to changes in transmembrane voltage. Bottom, left: An activation map (middle) depicts the speed of electrical conduction across the heart surface. Credit: Rafael Jaimes, Ph.D.; Luther Swift, Ph.D.; Manelle Ramadan, B.S.; Bryan Siegel, M.D.; James Hiebert, B.S., all of Children’s National Health System; and Daniel McInerney, student at The George Washington University.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute within the National Institutes of Health has awarded a $3.4 million, five-year grant to Nikki Gillum Posnack, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Children’s National Heart Institute within the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation (SZI) at Children’s National Health System, to answer that question and to provide insights that could accelerate development of safer biomaterials.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, patients who are undergoing IV therapy, blood transfusion, cardiopulmonary bypass or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or who receive nutrition through feeding support tubes have the potential to be exposed to DEHP.

Posnack led a recent study that found that an experimental model exposed to DEHP experienced altered autonomic regulation, heart rate variability and cardiovascular reactivity and reported the findings Nov. 6, 2017, in the American Journal of Physiology. The pre-clinical model study is the first to show such an association between phthalate chemicals used in everyday medical devices like IV tubing and cardiovascular health.

In the follow-on research, Posnack and colleagues will:

  • Use in vivo and whole heart models to define the extent to which biomaterial leaching and chemical exposure alters cardiovascular and autonomic function in experimental models
  • Determine whether biocompatibility and incidental chemical exposure are linked to cardiovascular and autonomic abnormalities experienced by pediatric patients post transfusion
  • Compare and contrast alternative biomaterials, chemicals and manufacturing techniques to identify safer transfusion device options.

“Ultimately, we hope to strengthen the evidence base used to inform decisions by the scientific, medical and regulatory communities about whether chemical additives that have endocrine-disrupting properties should be used to manufacture medical devices,” Posnack says. “Our findings also will highlight incentives that could accelerate development of alternative biomaterials, additives and fabrication techniques to improve safety for patients undergoing transfusion.”

Nikki Gillum Posnack

Experimental model study links phthalates and cardiovascular health

Nikki Gillum Posnack

“Because phthalate chemicals are known to migrate out of plastic products, our study highlights the importance of adopting safer materials, chemical additives and/or surface coatings for use in medical devices to reduce the risk of inadvertent exposure,” explains study senior author Nikki Gillum Posnack, Ph.D.

An experimental model exposed to di-2-ethylhexyl-phthalate (DEHP), a chemical that can leach from plastic-based medical devices, experienced altered autonomic regulation, heart rate variability and cardiovascular reactivity, according to a study published online Nov. 6, 2017 by the American Journal of Physiology. The pre-clinical model study is the first to show such an association between phthalate chemicals used in everyday medical devices like IV tubing and cardiovascular health.

“Plastics have revolutionized medical devices, transformed how we treat blood-based diseases and helped to make innovative cardiology procedures possible,” says Nikki Gillum Posnack, Ph.D., study senior author and assistant professor at the Children’s National Heart Institute within the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation (SZI) at Children’s National Health System. “Because phthalate chemicals are known to migrate out of plastic products, our study highlights the importance of adopting safer materials, chemical additives and/or surface coatings for use in medical devices to reduce the risk of inadvertent exposure.”

According to the Food and Drug Administration, patients who are undergoing IV therapy, blood transfusion, cardiopulmonary bypass or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or who receive nutrition through feeding support tubes have the potential to be exposed to DEHP.

Patients undergoing extensive interventions to save their lives may be exposed to multiple plastic-based devices that supply oxygen and nutrition or that pump newly oxygenated blood to oxygen-starved organs.

“These interventions keep very fragile kids alive. What’s most important is getting patients the care they need when they need it,” Posnack says. “In the biomaterials field, our ultimate goal is to reduce inadvertent risks to patients that can result from contact with plastic products by identifying replacement materials or safer coatings to lower overall risk.”

In order to assess the safety of phthalate chemicals used in such medical devices, the Children’s-led research team implanted adult experimental models with radiofrequency transmitters that monitored their heart rate variability, blood pressure and autonomic regulation. Then, they exposed the experimental models to DEHP, a softener used in making the plastic polymer, polyvinyl chloride, flexible.

DEHP-treated pre-clinical models had decreased heart rate variability with lower-than-normal variation in the intervals between heart beats. The experimental models also showed an exaggerated mean arterial pressure response to ganglionic blockade. And in response to a stressor, the experimental models in the treatment group displayed enhanced cardiovascular reactivity as well as prolonged blood pressure recovery, according to the study team.

“The autonomic nervous system is a part of the nervous system that automatically regulates such essential functions as blood pressure and breathing rate without any conscious effort by the individual,” Posnack adds. “Because alterations in the autonomic balance provide an early warning sign of trouble – before symptoms of hypertension or atherosclerosis manifest – our findings underscore the importance of additional studies to explore the potential impact of phthalate chemicals on organ function.”

Billie Lou Short, M.D., chief of Children’s Division of Neonatology, called the paper an “important study” that builds on a foundation laid in the late 199os by Children’s researchers who were the first to show that plasticizers migrated from tubing in the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) circuit. Children’s researchers also led a study published in 2004 that evaluated the effect of plasticizers on the human reproductive system. A small number of adolescents who had undergone ECMO as newborns did not experience the complications that had been seen in in experimental models, Dr. Short says.

Posnack’s study co-authors include Rafael Jaimes III, Ph.D., SZI staff scientist; Meredith Sherman, SZI research technician; and Adam Swiercz, Narine Muselimyan and Paul J. Marvar, all of The George Washington University.

antibodies-illustration

Detecting and treating dnDSA early preserves allograft function

antibodies-illustration

Monitoring and treating de novo donor-specific antibodies (dnDSA) before they could cause graft damage helped to decrease dnDSA in a majority of pediatric kidney transplant recipients at Children National Health System and prevented graft failure in the first few years.

Development of de novo donor-specific antibodies (dnDSA) is known to cause graft failure. Therefore, a protocol aimed at prospective monitoring and treating dnDSA – before they can cause graft damage – was developed for kidney transplant recipients at Children National Health System. This helped to decrease dnDSA in 76 percent of pediatric patients and prevented graft failure in the first few years, indicates a longitudinal cohort study published online Jan. 22, 2018, in Pediatric Transplantation. However, the benefit of preserving function of transplanted kidneys came at a price: Heightened hospitalization rates for infection.

An estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of children develop dnDSA and many of these patients go on to develop allograft failure after three to six years, write the study authors.

Clinical signs of graft failure due to antibodies appear too late to safeguard long-term graft survival. According to the study authors, developing earlier methods to detect dnDSA offers the opportunity to intervene before irreversible graft injury occurs.

“Children’s National Health System instituted a routine protocol that standardizes monitoring and treatment of dnDSA,” says Asha Moudgil, M.D., FASN, associate chief of the Division of Nephrology at Children’s National and the study’s senior author. “We followed this protocol as we monitored and treated all children younger than 19 who received a kidney transplant at Children’s National from Jan. 1, 2008, to Dec. 31, 2013.”

After transplant, these children were monitored for development of dnDSA at six months and then yearly. Upon detection of DSA, these children underwent kidney biopsy to assess for acute rejection. Additionally, monitoring was intensified to every two months.

“Our patients did not have a statistically significant increase in graft loss or dysfunction, suggesting that early and targeted treatment of dnDSA may benefit patients,” says Asha Moudgil, M.D., FASN.

Sixty-seven of the 72 children who received kidney transplants during that six-year period were included in this retrospective analysis. Their mean age was 14.1 years. Acute cellular rejection was treated according to a prespecified protocol.

  • The team treated de novo DSA with high-dose intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) if antibody titers were low and added two doses of rituximab to that treatment regimen if antibody titers were high.
  • If either C1q binding of immunodominant DSA was present or C4d+ were seen on biopsy, six sessions of plasma exchange were added to the above protocol.
  • Kids who were resistant to such treatment approaches received an additional four doses of IVIG monthly.

Nearly 39 percent of the children developed dnDSA within a median of 1.36 years. Ten of these 26 children had increased creatinine, 12 had new onset proteinuria and six had newly diagnosed hypertension at the time the dnDSA was detected. The multivariate analysis found that the coefficient of variance of tacrolimus, which measures adherence to immunosuppressive drugs, was the only statistically significant predictor for developing dnDSA.

DSA-positive patients had a higher rate of admissions (1.23 hospital admissions for infectious- or immunosuppressive-related side effects per patient, compared with 0.59 hospital admissions for the DSA-negative patients), which the study team attributes to aggressive treatment of dnDSA.

“Our patients did not have a statistically significant increase in graft loss or dysfunction, suggesting that early and targeted treatment of dnDSA may benefit patients,” Dr. Moudgil adds. “There was a higher risk of treatment-related complications, however, and this risk must be balanced against the short-term benefit of prolonging allograft function.”

Study co-authors include Olga Charnaya, M.D., a Children’s fellow when the study was designed and the article was drafted, now at Johns Hopkins; and Children’s Nephrologist, Shamir Tuchman, M.D.