Research In Practice Blog
The Research In Practice Blog shares credible and timely commentary on the latest news, research, events, and more. Catch up on our most recent posts below.
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Rotavirus is a highly contagious virus that causes severe illness in infants. The pentavalent rotavirus vaccine (RV5) must be given to babies under 15 weeks, but some NICUs avoid vaccination due to concerns about transmitting the vaccine strain to unvaccinated infants. Clinical Futures experts completed a year-long study of a 100-bed NICU to…
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Axial disease in youth is a difficult to treat and often underdiagnosed condition affecting the spine and sacroiliac joints. This form of arthritis can cause pain and stiffness in the back and is sometimes mistaken for other conditions. Axial disease is a characteristic component frequently occurring in a group of conditions known as juvenile spondyloarthritis (SpA), the most common form of juvenile arthritis across the world accounting for as much as one-third of all cases. When untreated, these children are at risk of progression to ankylosing spondylitis which can result in fusion of the…
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Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Vanderbilt University Medical Center were awarded a $7.37 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) RC2 grant to focus on kidney stone disease research. The focus of the project will be to create a novel research tool called the Urinary Stone Disease Hub, known as USDHub, using de-identified patient data from over 230,000 individuals with kidney stone disease across nine health systems in the U.S.
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Pediatrics itself is a medical specialty, and pediatric professionals can further subspecialize in a focused area of expertise. Children’s hospitals offer families the expertise of pediatric subspecialities who work together provide a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to care. Such coordinated care is quarterbacked by pediatric hospitalists, who are attending physicians subspecialized in the field of Pediatric Hospital Medicine.
Hospitalists frequently rely on consultations from other subspecialists such as gastroenterologists, cardiologists, and infectious diseases clinicians to…
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Most young children with pneumonia who are well enough to be cared for at home have an infection caused by a virus, which does not need to be treated with antibiotics. Despite this, most children with mild pneumonia who are cared for in the outpatient setting receive an antibiotic. To improve how antibiotics are used for children with pneumonia it is important to understand the reasons why it might be difficult to not use them. A research team set out to identify these reasons.
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Bronchiolitis is an infection of the airways that causes cold-like symptoms and breathing difficulty, and most commonly affects children under 2 years old. It can be severe enough to require oxygen therapy, suctioning, or IV fluids, but guidelines specify limiting the use of continuous pulse oximetry (cSpO2) monitoring only to patients receiving supplemental oxygen. Even so, many pediatric patients for whom cSpO2 is not recommended are receiving it unnecessarily.
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It’s been an exceptional year for CHOP and the Research Institute as our researchers pursue improvements in clinical effectiveness and policy-oriented health services. A great example of this focus is the Pilot Grant Program, a collaboration between Clinical Futures and PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The Pilot Grant Program supports CHOP investigators and researchers in launching research studies associated with clinical effectiveness and policy-oriented health services. Projects designed to investigate disparities and improve equity of healthcare access and outcomes are…
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LGBTQ+ Adolescents experience more significant negative mental health outcomes. Many must navigate social stigma and rejection, and recent surveillance data revealed that fewer than 40% found their homes to be LGBTQ-affirming.
Evidence has demonstrated that family support does affect the mental health outcomes of LGBTQ+ youth, so a team of clinical researchers explored whether family support has an impact on mental health outcomes. A data-driven investigation was conducted to assess whether positive family support mitigates the risk of depressive symptoms and suicidality in this population…
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Just a few years ago, COVID necessitated immediate transitions to technology-based adaptations of care delivery for both specialists and primary care clinicians. Today, many such adaptations persist, even though they have yet to be validated through traditional scientific methods.
When the pandemic abruptly forced a clinical research team to stop delivering and evaluating the in-person Child Adult Relationship Enhancement (PriCARE) positive parenting intervention, they quickly adapted the intervention for virtual delivery. The researchers wanted to understand whether virtual PriCARE…
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Antibiotic stewardship programs combat antimicrobial resistance, reduce polypharmacy, and improve patient outcomes. For neonatal intensive care (NICU) providers, the programs can be particularly impactful—extremely low birth-weight (ELBW) infants have high rates of exposure, and preemptive prescribing while awaiting infection confirmation is common. Individual systems have reported success with guidelines and strategies for judicious antibiotic use, but a large-cohort retrospective observational study to quantify changes over time was recently conducted by Dr. Dustin Flannery and his…
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Newly licensed young drivers have a very high crash risk, which is mainly attributable to skill deficits and related driving errors. Through an innovative initiative made possible by a gift from NJM Insurance, CHOP teams piloted and scaled a process for integrating a novel virtual driving assessment into a busy primary care setting.
