Pediatric Hospital Medicine Research

Our Pediatric Hospital Medicine faculty members develop one or more areas of expertise related to our clinical work. Individual practice configurations depend on each member’s personal interests. Examples include:

• Clinical research
• Clinical practice advancement through observation and publication
• Quality improvement initiatives

Health Services Research Academy

The Division’s Health Services Research Academy is a partnership with the Children’s Health Association. The program offers access to national databases such as Pediatric Health Information System® (PHIS), Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), the Medicare claims database, and others, and provides statistical support.

Based on faculty members’ and fellows’ interests, three to four projects are selected annually for this program. Additionally, all fellows complete their scholarly projects through this program.

Past presentations and publications span a range of topics, including:

• Cost consciousness and accuracy among hospitalists at U.S. children’s hospitals
• Neighborhood opportunity and rehospitalization for common diagnoses at U.S. children’s hospitals
• Pediatric rhabdomyolysis and renal failure: A 10-year population-based study
• Sustaining long-term asthma outcomes at a community and tertiary care pediatric hospital
• Development of an achievable benchmarks of care report card for pediatric hospital medicine
• Pharmacologic restraint use during mental health admissions to acute care pediatric hospitals
• Trends in resource utilization for new-onset acute psychosis hospitalizations at U.S. children’s hospitals
• Impact of RSV vaccine and Nirsevimab on hospital capacity across the U.S.
• Measles trends across the U.S.
• Trends in hospitalization for children with tracheostomy and ventilator use over the past decade across children’s hospitals in the U.S.
• Factors impacting readmission among children with medical complexity
• Discharge times across U.S. children’s hospitals and factors impacting early versus late discharges

Faculty accomplishments include peer-reviewed publications and presentations at national and regional meetings. Faculty are also involved in writing book chapters. Some faculty research interests include:

• Quality initiatives and patient outcomes
• Information technology
• Global health
• Complex care
• Health care costs and outcomes
• Developing benchmarks of care

Quality Improvement Projects

Our faculty are involved in developing and implementing quality improvement projects, including the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Value in Inpatient Pediatrics network projects.

Recent quality improvement projects include:

• Reducing NPO time for hospitalized children requiring surgery
• Reducing medical emergent transfers (METs) and improving controlled ICU transfers, which has increased controlled ICU transfers by over 90%
• Early discharge prediction through electronic medical records (EMRs), with 50% of discharges now being identified 12 hours ahead of time
• Discharge milestones implementation
• Development of medical readiness for discharge
• Medical reconciliation at admission, aimed at improving home medication order reconciliation
• Preventing “note bloat” in EMRs by using Epic templates to reduce documentation time and volume
• Eliminating monitor overuse: Pediatric Research in the Inpatient Setting network-appropriate monitoring in children with bronchiolitis
• Delabeling of penicillin allergy
• Reducing hospital-acquired conditions: PIVIE reduction program
• Reducing bronchiolitis length of stay (LOS) to the national benchmark