Jennifer L. Reed, MD, MS: Improving Adolescent Sexual Health Care in the Emergency Department Setting

Reed is a pediatric emergency medicine clinician and researcher with interest in adolescent sexual healthcare. She is the director of Scientific Review and Development and a professor in the Division of Emergency Medicine. She is the senior author on a seminal paper in 2019 on how an ED-based intervention for young women at risk for pregnancy might improve the initiation of long-acting reversible contraception.

Reed currently is a co-principal investigator on a multicenter, NIH funded R01 supported by PECARN (Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network) examining the clinical and cost effectiveness of a universally offered STI screening intervention versus a targeted intervention. She is working closely with the site principal investigators and informatics to develop and implement this intervention nationally.

Lisa M. Vaughn, PhD: Promoting Health Equity through Patient-Family-Community Engagement in Research

Vaughn is a social psychologist with expertise in qualitative research methodologies, community-based participatory research and patient-family-community engagement in research. Vaughn recently took on the leadership role of co-editor for the Journal for Participatory Research Methods.

Vaughn specializes in facilitating community-academic partnerships that engage community stakeholders in the research process including Latinos Unidos por la Salud, a Latinx immigrant community research team that conducts health research for the past seven years, a city-wide youth council that works as co-researchers to prevent teen suicide (Youth Council for Suicide Prevention), and a partnership with high school students and teachers to research drug abuse and addiction in local communities (Youth Built Change).

Changing the outcome of children with anaphylaxis: Timothy E. Dribin, MD; David Schnadower, MD, MPH

Dribin and Schnadower are emergency physicians and clinician scientists dedicated to advancing and optimizing the care of children with anaphylaxis. Along with collaborators from Boston Children’s Hospital, they recently completed two informative retrospective cohort studies on anaphylaxis. Their work demonstrated that asthma history is not a risk factor for severe anaphylactic reactions (meaning clinicians should not consider asthma comorbidity as a stand-alone criterion for hospitalization), and that clinical data available early in care such as blood pressure and the need for a second dose of epinephrine can inform the length of ED observation and need for hospitalization. Dribin and Schnadower are leading the science of care on multiple fronts: they initiated a multicenter anaphylaxis study across 30 North American EDs to better understand the epidemiology of children with anaphylaxis, and convened a national group of allergy experts to develop a consensus grading system for acute allergic reactions and outcome definitions for persistent, refractory, and biphasic anaphylaxis.

Translating Tobacco Control Interventions into the Pediatric Emergency Setting: E. Melinda Mahabee-Gittens, MD, MS

Mahabee-Gittens is the first investigator to translate evidence-based tobacco smoke exposure reduction and parental tobacco cessation interventions into the busy pediatric emergency department (ED) and urgent care (UC) settings. This seminal work with over 3,000 children and parents involves the incorporation of complex screening, intervention and sample collection protocols to help fit research procedures seamlessly into the clinical workflow. This research provides important answers on how to intervene with parents during their child’s healthcare visit. In her recent R01-funded smoking cessation randomized trial of 750 parental smokers recruited in the ED and UC settings, parents were receptive to receiving cessation counseling and free nicotine replacement therapy. Results of this study were concerning for childhood environmental risk. Thirty percent of children under the age of 5 had secondhand smoke exposure levels equal to that of active smokers and the 2-4 year-olds had levels of hand nicotine (a measure of thirdhand smoke exposure) over seven times higher than nonsmoking adults living with smokers. Mahabee-Gittens is further exploring the effects of exposure to secondhand and thirdhand smoke on pediatric clinical outcomes in two additional R01-funded efforts.

Judith W. Dexheimer, PhD: Improving Clinical Informatics Implementations

Dexheimer, biomedical informaticist, is an associate professor of research with dual appointments in the Divisions of Emergency Medicine and Biomedical Informatics. Her research focuses on implementing machine learning directly into clinical care, multi-center implementations of informatics solutions, and working to provide health information to underserved populations. Dexheimer, an R01 funded investigator, currently drives the success of three major research initiatives that impact clinical care through collaboration. With the Division of Neurology, she successfully integrated an existing Natural Language Processing-based epilepsy classifier with the University of Cincinnati Neurology clinics. With foster care experts, Dexheimer created a solution that now gives youth in foster care access to their personal health information including data from the electronic health record and from Hamilton County Job and Family Services. With collaborator, Andrea Beaton, MD, in the Division of Cardiology, and supported by funding from the American Heart Association, Dexheimer is designing and implementing an informatics system into clinics in Uganda to help with the treatment of patients with rheumatic heart disease.

A HOMERUN in PECARN – Hospitals of Midwest Emergency Research Node (HOMERUN) in the Pediatric Emergency Care Research Network (PECARN): Lynn Babcock, MD, MS; Richard Ruddy, MD

While the baseball season is shorter this year, HOMERUN is hitting it out of the park by making significant contributions to improve health outcomes for children requiring emergency medicine services. HOMERUN was competitively re-funded in 2019, and is one of seven nodes in the PECARN network. HOMERUN, based in the Division of Emergency Medicine, brings together Cincinnati Children's with key partners at St. Louis Children's Hospital, and the Medical College of Wisconsin Children’s Hospital, as well as the Cincinnati Fire Department as our emergency medical services affiliate. HOMERUN features the following key Cincinnati Children's players: Lynn Babcock, MD, MS, - nodal PI; Tara Rhine, MD, MS, - hospital principal investigator (PI); Lauren Riney, DO, EMS PI; Brad Sobolewski, MD, MEd - dissemination PI; Patricia Cobb, BS, MS, - nodal administrator; Richard Ruddy, MD; Schnadower; and Hamilton Schwartz, MD, MEd, as scientific advisors; along with several other EM and extra-divisional faculty as site PIs on PECARN-sponsored studies.

HOMERUN contributed to landmark clinical trials that defined treatment in bronchiolitis, epilepsy, gastroenteritis, diabetic ketoacidosis and sickle cell pain. Research also informs the utility of approaches in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, defined low-risk decision rules in head trauma and abdominal trauma, and outlined the optimal approach to screening for risk of suicide in the ED. HOMERUN invested into the development of over 15 junior investigators and currently supports pilot work for future studies in prehospital sepsis screening, penicillin allergy challenges, anaphylaxis management, prehospital analgesia, a prehospital asthma management bundle, predictors of concussion outcomes and biomarkers in orthopedic infections.