PECARN’s WPEMR node advances mentorship, data linkages, enrollment

The West/Southwest Pediatric Emergency Medicine Research (WPEMR) node – one of the seven nodes within the first federally funded emergency research network in the United States, the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) – continues to focus on mentorship and development of rising young talent.

The principal investigator (PI) for the node is Eileen Klein, MD, MPH, at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Site leaders are Michael Sayre, MD, at Seattle Fire/Medic One; Mohamed Badawy, MD, Children’s Medical Center Dallas (University of Texas-Southwestern), and Todd P. Chang, MD, MAcM, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

New Affiliate Researchers

While the four sites within the WPEMR have actively grown and mentored rising researchers, WPEMR has also taken on three affiliate faculty from sites outside of its three primary hospital-based emergency department affiliates (HEDAs): 

• Jennifer Fishe, MD, had joined in 2020 for her work in exploring oral steroids for asthma in a prehospital setting. She is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Florida (UF)-Jacksonville and serves as the Associate Medical Director of the UF Health Jacksonville Pediatric Emergency Department and Associate Medical Director for Pediatrics for two local fire departments. She has always been interested in prehospital and EMS research and was PI for a HRSA grant (H34MC30232) on the implementation of a pediatric destination decision-making tool. She is also the Director for the UF Center for Data Solutions, further providing local infrastructure for biostatistical support.  
• Colleen Gutman, MD, joined WPEMR in 2021 and is currently Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at UF-Gainesville. Gutman has had a rising research career focused on access to care and issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. These include differences in management such as for diagnostic imaging and language or communication facilitation. She is currently focused on her KL2 and preparing for her K-award support, focused on examining health equity in febrile infant management.
• Mohsen Saidinejad, MD, MBA, is an affiliate member of WPEMR from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and the Lundquist Institute; in the latter institute he works as the Director for the Institute for Health Service and Outcomes Research. He works closely with local efforts within the National Pediatric Readiness Project and is part of the executive team for the EMSC Innovation and Improvement Center and the Pediatric Pandemic Network. He provides an implementation perspective to WPEMR activities. 

Investigator News

• Neil Uspal, MD, is being promoted to HEDA PI for Seattle Children's Hospital. Eileen Klein will remain Nodal PI with her additional work as the PECARN Chair. Mohamed Badawy, MD, has taken over as HEDA PI for Children’s Medical Center Dallas-University of Texas (UT)-Southwestern, from Halim Hennes, MD, MS, who is enjoying retirement. 
• Jeanine Hall, MD, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, was awarded a Diversity Supplement Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for her two-year protocol Post-Emergency department Access to Care for Headaches (PEACH). The supplement was awarded for her multi-methods proposal to determine how follow-up care for a sentinel ED visit for headache is associated with different insurance plans, as well as race, ethnicity, and preferred language. Four PECARN sites are participating in her study, including three WPEMR EDs and the Children’s Hospital of New York, where Dan Tsze, MD, serves as the PI for the parent study, Headache Assessment of Children for Emergent Intracranial Abnormalities (HEADACHE). The diversity supplement has been a stepping stone for Hall’s emerging investigator career as she prepares for her KL2 and K-award applications for 2023.
• Pradip Chaudhari, MD, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, has been working on studies pertaining to both big data and traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children through his KL2 award funded through the Southern California Clinical Translational Science Institute. He has been instrumental in the growth of WPEMR and the peer mentorship program for his and others’ study proposals and career development. His current K-award application builds on his prior work on TBI management, specifically on prediction rules for repeat neuroimaging. 
• Catherine R. Counts, PhD, MHA, has been working on local efforts through Seattle Medic One and multiple other EMS agencies within and affiliated with PECARN on a pediatric cardiopulmonary and respiratory arrest registry dataset. This dataset will be used to evaluate the availability of vital sign data throughout pediatric resuscitations as well other measures relating to CPR and ventilatory support. She has played an active role in the EMSA Consortium, recently taking over as the co-chair alongside Manish Shah, MD, MS. Additionally, she is the PECARN representative for the Prehospital Pediatric Readiness Project (PPRP) Steering Committee as well as the PPRP Dissemination Subcommittee chair. She is currently applying for a KL2 that builds on the Seattle Children’s Hospital efforts to integrate hospital outcomes into the Seattle Fire patient care records. 

Linking Prehospital and Hospital Data

Seattle Children’s has created a data linkage with regional EMS agencies to link prehospital EMS data to in-hospital data. This linkage is used for clinical care in the ED, education of EMS teams through follow-up on patients they have cared for, and is a tool for research, including the currently enrolling PECARN PediDOSE study.

High Enrollers

WPEMR has ramped up the local prospective research infrastructure in all three of its hospital sites. This includes increasing research coordinator and research assistant infrastructure and training processes shared across all sites.

As a result:

• WPEMR’s Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Children’s Medical Center Dallas are the top two enrolling sites for PECARN’s HEADACHE study.
• WPEMR has also been high enroller for PROMPT-BOLUS, the multinetwork study on fluid therapies and resultant renal function in septic shock among children. Seattle Children’s was the first to enroll, and both Dallas and Los Angeles are among the higher enrollers as well.

Up Next

WPEMR will be hosting PECARN’s first in-person meeting since 2020 next month in Seattle.

“We are excited to meet many new faces and colleagues in person to foster new ideas and science towards improving the lives of acutely ill or injured children,” says Chang.

To learn more about WPEMR, visit https://pecarn.org/research-nodes/.