Emergency Medicine

The 2021-2022 academic year demonstrated the ever-increasing academic success of faculty and research teams in emergency medicine. The Division of Emergency Medicine champions the delivery of excellent care and the creation of important and innovative science in discovery, treatment, and outcomes of care for ill and injured children at the patient and population levels.

Our overall research productivity reached new heights in FY22 with 170 peer-reviewed publications, forty-six grant submissions, and $3,900,044 total grant award dollars. Our clinical research enrollment processes, challenged during the pandemic by lower volumes and concerns for infection control, regained sustained effectiveness. Notable is our success in recruiting research subjects in the busy and stressful environment of the emergency department and urgent care setting. Our research coordinators enrolled over 2,200 patients into prospective research studies during FY22 with a 88% capture rate of eligible participants. Processes for consent and follow-up are nearly 100% paperless, dramatically improving our team's efforts' overall efficiency and effectiveness.

Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN)

The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) anchors our participation in multi-site cohort studies and randomized trials. Lynn Babcock, MD, MS, leads our local PECARN team. We are the coordinating site for the Midwest node of this research network and contribute nationally to the scientific direction of emergency medicine research. A total of 14 PECARN studies are active at Cincinnati Children's, including two led by division faculty, Jennifer Reed, MD, MS, on optimal sexual transmitted infection (STI) screening and Schnadower on treatment outcomes for Shiga toxin infections. Our research partnerships extend to community-based care groups, including emergency medical system groups like the Cincinnati Fire Department. With Cincinnati Fire, we are launching a study to assess the effect of a standardized approach to treating seizures before a child even arrives at the emergency department. A key innovation led by the Cincinnati PECARN team in FY22 is the creation of a feasibility tool now used network-wide to identify which protocols are likely to be successful in executing their research processes across sites.

Medical Resuscitation Committee

Resuscitation science is a long-standing strength of our division. The Medical Resuscitation Committee combines the development of innovative practice with research on the outcomes of new pathways and procedures. In FY22, a new educational intervention shows early promise in successfully executing a key step in resuscitation, namely the placement of a breathing tube on the first attempt in our trauma bay. Katie Edmunds, MD, MED, and Preston Dean, MD, co-led the development of this important initiative. This effort builds on previous work demonstrating how an improvement bundle for children in cardiac arrest promotes the team’s reliable success in executing five critical steps in the first two minutes of care. Our commitment to innovation and excellence through research translates to children at risk of dying receiving the best possible chance of survival.

Lisa Vaughn, PhD

Vaughn and Amanda Schondelmeyer, MD, MSc, from the Division of Hospital Medicine, collaborated to successfully create a new center for research support institutionally. The Qualitative Methods & Analysis Center (QMAC), launched in July 2021, promotes the conduct of rigorous qualitative and participatory research by providing consultation services, resources, and support in qualitative study design, data collection and data analysis. In its first year of operations, the center received more than 30 requests for collaboration and expert consultation.

Melinda Mahabee-Gittens, MD, MS

Mahabee-Gittens continues to lead in scientific discovery and analysis of how tobacco exposure impacts child health. She is the first investigator to determine children of smokers carry tobacco smoke toxicants (i.e., nicotine, a tobacco smoke pollutant) on their hands even when they are not around smokers or live in homes where no one smokes inside. Her research techniques define new standards for exposure measurement in young children who naturally explore their environments with hands and mouths. Mahabee-Gittens’ work reveals that third-hand smoke exposure levels on children’s hands can associate with infectious illnesses (e.g., ear infection) and respiratory illnesses (e.g., asthma) previously thought to only relate to active smoke exposure.

Daniel Schumacher, MD, PhD, MEd

Schumacher focuses his scholarship on physician performance assessment. Securing more than $1 million in FY 22 in new funding to advance work will help define the future of pediatric board certification.

Jennifer Reed, MD, MS

Reed is a national leader in adolescent sexual and reproductive care in the pediatric emergency department setting. She and national collaborators are producing actionable research on screening and treatment for a range of STIs. They are also leveraging their large cohort studies to study access to and use of contraception to key questions on young women’s health and pregnancy-specific care.

David Schnadower, MD, MPH

Schnadower and collaborators across North America are a recipient of a nine-million dollar grant from NIAID to conduct a Phase III, embedded, cluster-randomized, crossover trial in 26 centers in the US and Canada to compare hyperhydration with conservative fluid management as treatment for children infected with a type of bacteria (high-risk Shiga toxin) known to cause serious kidney injuries. The results of this trial will inform clinical practice and improve outcomes related to this serious infection.