Division Photo
Row 1: R Kahn, S Callahan, J Simmons, T DeWitt, S Shah, M Mansour, M Klein, S Muething
Row 2: M Seehausen Kane, L Crosby, J Beischel, E Springer, Z Samaan, K Lewis, AM Fitz, W Chouteau, K Hicks, K Jerardi, N Goyal, M Parker, J Klein, J Motley
Row 3: A Hurm, J Cross, L Kelley, G Hartz, K Copeland, K Yolton, A Statile, D Elkeeb, L Solan, J Thomson, S Geraghty, J Hardie, C Brown, C McIntyre
Row 4: T Wendling, J Ragsdale, N DeBlasio, S Riddle, B Bolser, H Kalkwarf, A Diewert, N Unaka, C White, R Schaengold, G Szumlas, T Tiller, J Morehous
Row 5: A Poltrack, N Newman, D Fletcher, J Schaffzin, B Brinkman, T Sigrest, S Polonsky, P Brady, MB Pero, KJ Phelan, B Lewis
Division Highlights
Patrick Brady, MD, MSc
Dr. Brady's research interests involve defining predictors and early warning signs of clinical deterioration and then developing highly reliable interventions to identify and mitigate risk to eliminate patient harm. He is leading large scale improvement projects on patient safety using the concept of situation awareness to decrease patient harm and unsafe transfers. His goals are both to achieve measurably safer care among inpatients at CCHMC and to describe and disseminate generalizable interventions to improve situation awareness and patient safety more broadly.
Wiliam Brinkman, MD, MEd
Dr. Brinkman's work focuses on shared decision making between clinicians and patients/parents to deliver care that is evidence-based, family-centered, and of high value. Recent research has explored how physicians and families interact to make treatment decisions for children with ADHD. Dr. Brinkman is currently funded by the National Institute of Mental Health to study factors that influence parent decisions after their child is diagnosed with ADHD. In addition, he continues to study interventions to facilitate shared decision making in the care of children with ADHD.
Patrick Conway, MD, MS
Until May 2011, Dr. Conway was Director of the Section of Hospital Medicine which includes over 25 faculty and staff physicians who care for approximately a quarter of the Cincinnati Children’s inpatients, teach residents and medical students, and conduct multi-million dollar research projects. Dr. Conway’s specific research interests include comparative effectiveness research, implementation research, and the rapid adoption of comparative evidence into practice and decision-making. He was a faculty member in the Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence, Director of Rapid Evidence Adoption for Child Health, and AVP for Outcomes Performance. He is now Chief Medical Officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Director of the Office of Clinical Standards and Quality at CMS.
Thomas DeWitt, MD
Dr. DeWitt is the Director of the Division of General and Community Pediatrics and the Designated Institutional Official. He is primarily interested in faculty and educator development, medical education and innovation linked to research and outcomes, and leadership development.
Sheela Geraghty, MD, MS
Dr. Geraghty is a general pediatrician and a lactation consultant. She is the medical director of the Cincinnati Children's Center for Breastfeeding Medicine, which consists of three outpatient referral-based breastfeeding medicine clinics, an inpatient consultative service, a milk bank depot, and an information line which receives over 2,000 phone calls annually. This past year, along with the Department of Human Resources, Dr. Geraghty helped develop the Cincinnati Children’s Employee Lactation Support Program. Dr. Geraghty’s research interests focus on the barriers to successful breastfeeding outcomes, including the prevalent practice of breast milk pumping and the potential impact on the mother-infant dyad.
Karen Jerardi, MD
Dr. Jerardi's interests include medical education of medical students and residents. She is the director of the Pediatric Hospital Medicine elective rotation for residents. Also, she has interests in clinical and quality research in common pediatric conditions.
Robert Kahn, MD, MPH
Dr. Kahn is focused on understanding and ameliorating social and racial disparities in child health. This past year, he has implemented a large NIH funded study of children admitted with asthma to better understand what predicts time to readmission and what causes disadvantaged children to be admitted much sooner. The study examines multiple factors ranging from neighborhood to family to genetics. He has also developed and helps guide several innovative programs to address key causal factors. These include novel clinical approaches driven by collaborations with the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati, the Freestore Foodbank, and the Cincinnati Health Department. Finally, Dr. Kahn is interested in bridging clinical care and public health. He leads the new Population Health initiative that will be addressing infant mortality, injury, obesity, and asthma in Hamilton County. In an effort to learn at a smaller geographic level using improvement science methods, Dr. Kahn is working closely with agencies in Price Hill to help transform early childhood systems.
Eric Kirkendall, MD
Dr. Kirkendall is a pediatric hospitalist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Medical. He also performs operational and research activities as the Director of Clinical Decision Support through Information Services and as a patient safety researcher through the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence. Dr Kirkendall is currently finishing a master’s degree in medical informatics from Oregon Health & Science University. His specific research interests include leveraging information technology to improve patient care and safety.
Melissa Klein, MD
Dr. Klein is a general pediatrician, medical educator, and researcher. She is mainly interested in medical education research, and primarily studies the impact of teaching social determinants of child health to pediatric residents.
Kadriye Lewis, EdD
Dr. Lewis is actively involved in the Online Master’s Degree in Education and the Online Certificate in Medical Education Programs through her work as the associate director and as an online educator. She conducts educational research on issues arising in and related to online, asynchronous learning, especially in the context of the Online Master's Degree program. Dr. Lewis helps faculty and staff within CCHMC in teaching technology as needed and guiding them to reach the right technology resources.
Mona Mansour, MD, MS
Two primary areas of interest for Dr. Mansour include improving health outcomes of children with asthma, especially children from underserved backgrounds, and school health. Her asthma work has primarily focused on the use of quality improvement methodology in different care environments to improve health outcomes for children with asthma including primary care practices, school based health centers and within the community health care system.
Daniel McLinden, EdD
Dr. McLinden's has interest in structured planning for and the evaluation of the impact of human capital development decisions. He has applied structured planning processes such as concept mapping and economic forecasting to educational planning. He has studied the evolution of programs through social network methods and has applied economic models to evaluate educational outcomes. Additionally, Dr. McLinden has an interest in applications of Rasch measurement models to improve the measurement of outcomes.
Stephen Muething, MD
Dr. Muething's academic pursuit is focused on patient safety in pediatrics. As we make changes to reduce overall rates of harm locally and across organizations, Dr. Muething is partnering with other faculty to study these changes, systematically measure outcomes, and report on results.
Nicholas Newman, DO
Dr. Newman's interests and research center around Pediatric Environmental Health. He is interested in understanding how toxicants in the environment can effect children's health and in developing approaches that can be implemented to prevent or mitigate these effects. His recent research has examined the effect of traffic related air pollution exposure on neurobehavioral problems in children. He is currently developing Pediatric Environmental Health outreach and educational materials for primary care practitioners.
Jennifer O'Toole, MD
Dr. O'Toole's research interests include physician handoffs, curriculum development and innovation in residency education. She is currently the CCHMC site PI for the I-PASS study, a large multi-institution study that focuses on resident education on the topic of handoffs of care to improve patient safety.
Christopher Peltier, MD
Dr. Peltier's academic interest and pursuit is in the area of community-based teaching of pediatric residents and medical students. He also has an interest in faculty education and development.
Zeina Samaan, MD
Dr. Samaan is focused on primary care quality improvement which include improvement of childhood immunization rate, improvement of influenza vaccination rate in high risk pediatric patients, preventing medical errors in primary care setting, development screening and Autism initiatives. She also focuses on the use of electronic health record to deliver quality of care; implemented flu alert using EHR to improve the rate of flu vaccinations.
Joshua Schaffzin, MD, PhD
Dr. Schaffzin is a member of the Hospital Medicine Section, Surgical Hospital Medicine Service. His clinical responsibilities involve post-operative co-management with certain surgical services of medically complex children as well as pediatric consults to all surgical patients. Dr. Schaffzin’s specific research interests include using molecular and quality improvement methods for surgical site infection prevention, infection control, patient safety, and healthcare epidemiology.
Jeffrey Simmons, MD, MS
As an investigator, Jeffrey M. Simmons, MD, MS, aims to integrate classical clinical research methods and quality improvement science to accelerate the integration of research and research findings into the general inpatient wards. His initial work has focused on better understanding the reasons for socioeconomic disparities such as financial strain and health beliefs among children hospitalized for asthma as well as redesigning the clinical care system to better address those disparities. Through collaborations with the Academic Improvement Collaborative/Beacon Communities Grant and the Inpatient Asthma Task Force, Dr. Simmons has piloted several interventions to address risk of poor asthma control and readmission.
Angela Statile, MD
Dr. Statile is an instructor of clinical pediatrics She is pursuing a master's in medical education degree through the University of Cincinnati and is actively involved in the development of division resident and medical student education. Her main research interests include resident education and quality improvement. Specifically, she is interested in the implementation of innovative hospital medicine curricula and improvement of the hospital discharge process.
Lisa Vaughn, PhD
Dr. Vaughn research interest include community-based participatory research with immigrant families especially Latinos, parental cultural health attributions about childhood health and illness, and culturally responsive/competent practice.
Brian Volck, MD
Dr. Volck MD is a member of the Hospital Medicine Unit within the Division of General and Community Pediatrics and is an innovator in medical education. His specific research interests include cross-cultural medical communication and indigenous child health. He is a founding member of the Initiative on Poverty, Justice and Health and a faculty participant/advisor in the Global Child Health residency track, coordinating resident away experiences at Gallup Indian Medical Center in Gallup, New Mexico. He is a member of the AAP’s Committee on Native American Child Health and US planning coordinator for the Fifth International Meeting on Indigenous Child Health, scheduled for spring, 2012.
Michael Vossmeyer, MD
Dr. Vossmeyer continues to develop and implement high reliability system of care in the area of patient safety, the use of situation awareness to improve patient safety and patient flow through complex adaptive systems, and the relationship between prior learning experience and the application of situation awareness.
Christine White, MD, MAT
Dr. White's interest and research focus on quality improvement. She has led efforts to increase medication reconciliation completion and improve physician compliance with proper handwashing. She is currently leading institute-wide improvement projects on improving capacity management and the patient/family experience.
Kimberly Yolton, PhD
Kimberly Yolton, PhD is a developmental psychologist researching the effects of prenatal and postnatal exposures to environmental toxicants (e.g. tobacco smoke, pesticides, and industrial chemicals) on neurobehavioral outcomes during infancy and childhood. She is additionally involved in research on neurobehavioral outcomes of high risk infants. She has expertise in research methodologies for assessing neurobehavior from the newborn period through adulthood.
Significant Accomplishments
Social Discriminants of Healthcare Utilization in Children with Asthma
Investigators within the Division of General Pediatrics have been working to better understand the social determinants of asthma and ways to intervene to mitigate socioeconomic risks. Adapting ideas from social economists, Jeff Simmons, MD, and Robert Kahn, MD, PhD, have measured “financial strain” that is associated with a four-fold gradient of asthma readmission risk and is a more important predictor of readmission than race or insurance status. Financial strain is measured with seven simple questions such as whether a family had to borrow money or move in with others during the past year. Their fellow, Andrew Beck, MD, has found strong correlations between a family’s financial strain and neighborhood measures of socioeconomic risk based on census data and found a 20-fold gradient of asthma admission risk between different neighborhoods in Cincinnati.
These clinician-researchers have used these insights to contribute to institutional multidisciplinary asthma quality improvement work lead by Mona Mansour, MD, MS, and Carolyn Kercsmar, MD, MS (pulmonary). Many interventions have been implemented that have resulted in children with Medicaid having 30-day and 90-day readmission rates that have decreased by 45 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Analyses of this work, funded by a Cincinnati Beacon Communities grant, are ongoing.
Online Master’s and Certificate Programs in Medical Education
The Online Master’s Degree in Education for Healthcare Professionals Program was launched in 2002 and represented a collaboration between the division and the University of Cincinnati College of Education. A Certificate in Medical Education Program was added in 2004. The programs were developed to address the need for an educational conceptual knowledge and research base for physician and other healthcare professional educators. Developed and administered by Kadriye Lewis, EdD, and Raymond Baker, MD, MEd, these programs were the first totally on-line programs of their kind in the United States and have had over 240 students enrolled. To date, there have been 51 master’s graduates and 31 certificates issued to professionals from 34 states, Puerto Rico and four countries. Students come from an array of medical specialties, surgery, dentistry and nursing. Based on a survey of 12 master’s graduates, who collectively have 52 peer-reviewed papers, $4.25 million in extramural funding (21 grants), 37 teaching awards and six promotions, the program has been highly successful in enhancing the development of academic medical education leaders. Graduates hold leadership positions including a dean, GME program directors and a departmental vice chair. As such, the program has developed a national and international reputation for excellence and plays an important role in training future leaders in medical education.
