Speakers:

Todd Florin, MD, MSCE, Associate Division Head for Academic Affairs & Research, Division of Emergency Medicine, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago; Professor of Pediatrics (Emergency Medicine), Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

L. Nelson Sanchez-Pinto, MD, MBI, Attending Physician, Critical Care, Ann & Robert Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago; Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Critical Care) and Preventive Medicine (Health and Biomedical Informatics), Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Title:

Transforming Research and Innovation for Acutely Ill Children

Abstract:

We will present an overview of the new Center for Pediatric Acute and Critical Care Research and Innovation (PACCRI) at Lurie Children's Hospital and its goal of fostering and facilitating ambitious, high-risk/high-reward research collaboration between clinicians and engineers, computer scientists, and data scientists. We will present two areas of active research by PACCRI faculty that may overlap with NICO faculty expertise: (1) predicting pneumonia in the emergency department, and (2) modeling hospital strain and resource allocation to prevent patient deterioration.

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Todd Florin is Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He is Associate Division Chief for Academic Affairs & Research for the Division of Emergency Medicine at Lurie, Scientific Director of Research Development at Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute, and Co-Director of PACCRI. Dr. Florin's research program aims to improve the diagnosis, management and outcomes of children with common, serious infections, with a current focus on lower respiratory tract infections. Complex challenges that Dr. Florin is tackling include heterogeneous and ill-defined phenotypes, lack of readily measurable reference standards, and unreliable clinical measurements. Current work centers on development of risk stratification tools and use of biomarkers to predict and improve outcomes in children with pneumonia at the point-of-care. His work has also centered on resource utilization, variation in care, antimicrobial stewardship, and use of clinical trials to improve treatments for respiratory tract infections in children. He is PI of an R01 from NHLBI to develop and validate a pediatric pneumonia risk score across 14 pediatric emergency departments, in addition to Co-PI of a 19-site clinical trial evaluating antibiotic treatment strategies in children with pneumonia funded by PCORI. He is co-PI on 2 multinational prospective cohort studies through the Pediatric Emergency Research Network (PERN) - one focused on pneumonia and the other on COVID-19 in children presenting for emergency care.

Dr. Nelson Sanchez-Pinto, MD, MBI, is a pediatric critical care physician and clinical informatics specialist. He is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Division of Critical Care) and Preventive Medicine (Division of Biostatistics and Informatics) at Northwestern University and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. His NIH-funded research focuses on applying data science and informatics tools to improve the care of children with sepsis and other acute and critical care conditions. He leads several large-scale data sharing initiatives and data collaboration projects both nationally and internationally, including co-leading the team that derived and validated the new Phoenix criteria for sepsis in children. He is one of the founders and past chairs of the PICU Data Collaborative, which collects granular, anonymized electronic health record data from critically ill children from 26 institutions in the US.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92586384543
PW: NICO26

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.