Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
The Cincinnati Children’s CERT is dedicated to pediatric quality and safety, with the goal of improving care and outcomes for children by optimizing the use of therapeutics and translating evidence-based research into practice and policy. The program supports four projects designed to achieve innovations in patient safety and advance patient-centered outcomes research —with a focus on kidney injury, ICU transfers, perinatal therapy, and arthritis treatment.
- Alerts for kidney injury: This project seeks to predict and prevent acute kidney injury in hospitalized children who receive nephrotoxic medications. Researchers are building tools into the hospital’s electronic medical records system to alert clinicians about patients at risk of suffering kidney damage and prompt them to conduct routine laboratory screenings. Plans are to share the tool with a network of nephrologists at academic medical centers,
- Reducing unsafe ICU transfers: Cincinnati Children's CERT clinicians are using situation awareness, a high reliability strategy, to reduce ICU transfers (when a patient requires aggressive therapy within the first hour of transfer from another hospital unit). The goal is to understand the signals that occur prior to patient deterioration and develop predictive trigger tools that help clinicians intervene quickly before serious side effects occur.
- Disseminating effective perinatal therapies: The Cincinnati Children’s CERT is collaborating with the Ohio Perinatal Quality Collaborative to evaluate dissemination and implementation strategies that prevent premature births and related adverse perinatal health problems.
- Involving families in arthritis treatment: Childhood arthritis is the sixth most-common childhood disease. This project is developing a shared decision-making tool to improve communication between clinicians and families and facilitate the safe use of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs.
In November 2011, the CCHMC CERTs co-sponsored “A National Meeting on Collaborative Improvement Networks” with the American Board of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association and “Building Capability and Capacity in Pediatric Quality and Safety” with the American Board of Pediatrics.
