Farah Hussain

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

I’ve learned so much this summer from working with Dr. Patrick Brady to better understand characteristics of pediatric patients who undergo clinical deterioration and unplanned transfers to the ICU. I’m very grateful to have spent my summer with a mentor who really cared about my growth as a student, and a fantastic group of physicians in the Division of Hospital Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Our work this summer revolved around working to define clinical characteristics and identifying predictors for emergency transfers to the ICU. An emergency transfer is when a patient is transferred from an acute care floor to an ICU where the patient received intubation, inotropes, or 3 or more fluid boluses in the first hour after arrival or before transfer. We designed a case-control study and compared emergency transfer cases from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital from 2013-2017 and matched controls 3:1 on age strata, hospital unit before transfer, and time of year. We recorded demographic data, as well as measured ICU length of stay, and hospital length of stay.

After data analysis, we discovered that children who have had an emergency transfer event spend a longer time in the ICU and in the hospital. After comparing hospital mortality, we can conclude that emergency transfer patients have a higher likelihood of hospital mortality.

From this preliminary research, the emergency transfer metric in children’s hospitals has the potential to enable more rapid learning and systems improvement. We have a few next steps to investigate these next couple months as well. We want to compare medical diagnoses and complex chronic conditions between the emergency transfer cases and controls. We also hope to describe the incidence using a patient-days denominator. Finally, our long term goals are to identify predictors for an emergency transfer event in children.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

I’ve learned so much this summer from working with Dr. Patrick Brady to better understand characteristics of pediatric patients who undergo clinical deterioration and unplanned transfers to the ICU. I’m very grateful to have spent my summer with a mentor who really cared about my growth as a student, and a fantastic group of physicians in the Division of Hospital Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Our work this summer revolved around working to define clinical characteristics and identifying predictors for emergency transfers to the ICU. An emergency transfer is when a patient is transferred from an acute care floor to an ICU where the patient received intubation, inotropes, or 3 or more fluid boluses in the first hour after arrival or before transfer. We designed a case-control study and compared emergency transfer cases from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital from 2013-2017 and matched controls 3:1 on age strata, hospital unit before transfer, and time of year. We recorded demographic data, as well as measured ICU length of stay, and hospital length of stay.

After data analysis, we discovered that children who have had an emergency transfer event spend a longer time in the ICU and in the hospital. After comparing hospital mortality, we can conclude that emergency transfer patients have a higher likelihood of hospital mortality.

From this preliminary research, the emergency transfer metric in children’s hospitals has the potential to enable more rapid learning and systems improvement. We have a few next steps to investigate these next couple months as well. We want to compare medical diagnoses and complex chronic conditions between the emergency transfer cases and controls. We also hope to describe the incidence using a patient-days denominator. Finally, our long term goals are to identify predictors for an emergency transfer event in children.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

I’ve learned so much this summer from working with Dr. Patrick Brady to better understand characteristics of pediatric patients who undergo clinical deterioration and unplanned transfers to the ICU. I’m very grateful to have spent my summer with a mentor who really cared about my growth as a student, and a fantastic group of physicians in the Division of Hospital Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Our work this summer revolved around working to define clinical characteristics and identifying predictors for emergency transfers to the ICU. An emergency transfer is when a patient is transferred from an acute care floor to an ICU where the patient received intubation, inotropes, or 3 or more fluid boluses in the first hour after arrival or before transfer. We designed a case-control study and compared emergency transfer cases from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital from 2013-2017 and matched controls 3:1 on age strata, hospital unit before transfer, and time of year. We recorded demographic data, as well as measured ICU length of stay, and hospital length of stay.

After data analysis, we discovered that children who have had an emergency transfer event spend a longer time in the ICU and in the hospital. After comparing hospital mortality, we can conclude that emergency transfer patients have a higher likelihood of hospital mortality.

From this preliminary research, the emergency transfer metric in children’s hospitals has the potential to enable more rapid learning and systems improvement. We have a few next steps to investigate these next couple months as well. We want to compare medical diagnoses and complex chronic conditions between the emergency transfer cases and controls. We also hope to describe the incidence using a patient-days denominator. Finally, our long term goals are to identify predictors for an emergency transfer event in children.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

My research experience this summer has been full of learning both clinical and academic aspects of medicine. I had the opportunity to observe my mentor plus other hospitalists rounding on patients, and sit in on presentations to hear about the spectacular work that different faculty members are implementing. This has helped me gain a better understanding of hospital medicine, and really sparked my interest in the field.

I love that hospitalists can play a major role in treating the sickest of patients, while at the same time work to investigate ways to make the patients’ time at a hospital a better experience.

My mentor, Dr. Patrick Brady, has been very helpful giving me insight on research methods for our project and how best to use the data we have collected. We were able to make some adjustments in our exclusion criteria for the patients included in the retrospective case control study, so that I have time to collect several clinical characteristics of each patient who underwent an emergency transfer. While going over several emergency transfer cases, I have learned quite a bit of clinical information. One example of what I’ve learned involves rapid sequence intubation drugs when endotracheal intubation procedures are done. The procedure requires quick onset sedatives and pain medications in addition to neuromuscular blocking agents to rapidly numb and sedate the patient in order to put in the tube.

We are wrapping up this week and beginning to run some simple statistical analyses on the data. I hope to have some insight on the incidence and descriptors of emergency transfer cases in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital by the end of the week. I am preparing to begin writing and creating presentations for dissemination.

Reflecting back on my work this summer, I am encouraged by the amount of progress that I was able to make in the short period of time. Completing a research project over a nine-week period is a very challenging task as it comes with many limitations. However, Dr. Brady helped me realize that important questions can still be answered if the project is designed efficiently. I could see myself doing similar research in my future as a physician. I very much like the idea of studying what is clinically right in front of you.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

My research experience this summer has been full of learning both clinical and academic aspects of medicine. I had the opportunity to observe my mentor plus other hospitalists rounding on patients, and sit in on presentations to hear about the spectacular work that different faculty members are implementing. This has helped me gain a better understanding of hospital medicine, and really sparked my interest in the field.

I love that hospitalists can play a major role in treating the sickest of patients, while at the same time work to investigate ways to make the patients’ time at a hospital a better experience.

My mentor, Dr. Patrick Brady, has been very helpful giving me insight on research methods for our project and how best to use the data we have collected. We were able to make some adjustments in our exclusion criteria for the patients included in the retrospective case control study, so that I have time to collect several clinical characteristics of each patient who underwent an emergency transfer. While going over several emergency transfer cases, I have learned quite a bit of clinical information. One example of what I’ve learned involves rapid sequence intubation drugs when endotracheal intubation procedures are done. The procedure requires quick onset sedatives and pain medications in addition to neuromuscular blocking agents to rapidly numb and sedate the patient in order to put in the tube.

We are wrapping up this week and beginning to run some simple statistical analyses on the data. I hope to have some insight on the incidence and descriptors of emergency transfer cases in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital by the end of the week. I am preparing to begin writing and creating presentations for dissemination.

Reflecting back on my work this summer, I am encouraged by the amount of progress that I was able to make in the short period of time. Completing a research project over a nine-week period is a very challenging task as it comes with many limitations. However, Dr. Brady helped me realize that important questions can still be answered if the project is designed efficiently. I could see myself doing similar research in my future as a physician. I very much like the idea of studying what is clinically right in front of you.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

My research experience this summer has been full of learning both clinical and academic aspects of medicine. I had the opportunity to observe my mentor plus other hospitalists rounding on patients, and sit in on presentations to hear about the spectacular work that different faculty members are implementing. This has helped me gain a better understanding of hospital medicine, and really sparked my interest in the field.

I love that hospitalists can play a major role in treating the sickest of patients, while at the same time work to investigate ways to make the patients’ time at a hospital a better experience.

My mentor, Dr. Patrick Brady, has been very helpful giving me insight on research methods for our project and how best to use the data we have collected. We were able to make some adjustments in our exclusion criteria for the patients included in the retrospective case control study, so that I have time to collect several clinical characteristics of each patient who underwent an emergency transfer. While going over several emergency transfer cases, I have learned quite a bit of clinical information. One example of what I’ve learned involves rapid sequence intubation drugs when endotracheal intubation procedures are done. The procedure requires quick onset sedatives and pain medications in addition to neuromuscular blocking agents to rapidly numb and sedate the patient in order to put in the tube.

We are wrapping up this week and beginning to run some simple statistical analyses on the data. I hope to have some insight on the incidence and descriptors of emergency transfer cases in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital by the end of the week. I am preparing to begin writing and creating presentations for dissemination.

Reflecting back on my work this summer, I am encouraged by the amount of progress that I was able to make in the short period of time. Completing a research project over a nine-week period is a very challenging task as it comes with many limitations. However, Dr. Brady helped me realize that important questions can still be answered if the project is designed efficiently. I could see myself doing similar research in my future as a physician. I very much like the idea of studying what is clinically right in front of you.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

To give a status update on my project, I am almost finished collecting data for the Emergency ICU Transfer cases in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The project timeline is going as planned, and I should be finishing my data collection within the next week or so. I have begun to match control subjects by age strata, time of transfer and hospital unit to the Emergency ICU Transfer cases, and hope to finish that within the next week as well.

The data collection process has been a bit long and tedious, as I’ve been careful to identify and record the correct dates, transfer times, and clinical characteristics for each patient. Many of these patients suffer from several complex chronic conditions, and we are recording several aspects about their hospital stay. I’m predicting that the data collection for the control subjects will be more straightforward and quick, as it doesn’t require me to record as much detail about the clinical deterioration event. After this next week, I hope to begin statistically analyzing the results, which brings us one step closer to understanding why these events happen and how to prevent them.

To streamline data collection and make it available for analysis in the near future, I set up a REDcap data entry form for my project. This was initially a challenge because even though I have entered data using this online tool before, I had no experience creating my own forms. With a lot of help from Google, people who worked around me, and our campus REDcap administrators, I was able to set this up pretty quickly and independently. I have noticed that this tool is widely used for clinical research, and am glad that being able create project instruments within REDcap is now part of my skill set. This was a unique learning experience for me that I wasn’t expecting to gain. It helped me understand what needs to be done specifically in order to execute a clinical research project, such as the one I’m working on alongside my mentor.

I have also learned a little medical knowledge from reading patient charts as I’m collecting data. For example, for procedures such as intubation, I have been seeing what specific medications are being administered for the pediatric patient. It has been interesting to learn some medical details behind lifesaving procedures, before even having clinical exposure in my medical training.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

To give a status update on my project, I am almost finished collecting data for the Emergency ICU Transfer cases in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The project timeline is going as planned, and I should be finishing my data collection within the next week or so. I have begun to match control subjects by age strata, time of transfer and hospital unit to the Emergency ICU Transfer cases, and hope to finish that within the next week as well.

The data collection process has been a bit long and tedious, as I’ve been careful to identify and record the correct dates, transfer times, and clinical characteristics for each patient. Many of these patients suffer from several complex chronic conditions, and we are recording several aspects about their hospital stay. I’m predicting that the data collection for the control subjects will be more straightforward and quick, as it doesn’t require me to record as much detail about the clinical deterioration event. After this next week, I hope to begin statistically analyzing the results, which brings us one step closer to understanding why these events happen and how to prevent them.

To streamline data collection and make it available for analysis in the near future, I set up a REDcap data entry form for my project. This was initially a challenge because even though I have entered data using this online tool before, I had no experience creating my own forms. With a lot of help from Google, people who worked around me, and our campus REDcap administrators, I was able to set this up pretty quickly and independently. I have noticed that this tool is widely used for clinical research, and am glad that being able create project instruments within REDcap is now part of my skill set. This was a unique learning experience for me that I wasn’t expecting to gain. It helped me understand what needs to be done specifically in order to execute a clinical research project, such as the one I’m working on alongside my mentor.

I have also learned a little medical knowledge from reading patient charts as I’m collecting data. For example, for procedures such as intubation, I have been seeing what specific medications are being administered for the pediatric patient. It has been interesting to learn some medical details behind lifesaving procedures, before even having clinical exposure in my medical training.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

To give a status update on my project, I am almost finished collecting data for the Emergency ICU Transfer cases in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The project timeline is going as planned, and I should be finishing my data collection within the next week or so. I have begun to match control subjects by age strata, time of transfer and hospital unit to the Emergency ICU Transfer cases, and hope to finish that within the next week as well.

The data collection process has been a bit long and tedious, as I’ve been careful to identify and record the correct dates, transfer times, and clinical characteristics for each patient. Many of these patients suffer from several complex chronic conditions, and we are recording several aspects about their hospital stay. I’m predicting that the data collection for the control subjects will be more straightforward and quick, as it doesn’t require me to record as much detail about the clinical deterioration event. After this next week, I hope to begin statistically analyzing the results, which brings us one step closer to understanding why these events happen and how to prevent them.

To streamline data collection and make it available for analysis in the near future, I set up a REDcap data entry form for my project. This was initially a challenge because even though I have entered data using this online tool before, I had no experience creating my own forms. With a lot of help from Google, people who worked around me, and our campus REDcap administrators, I was able to set this up pretty quickly and independently. I have noticed that this tool is widely used for clinical research, and am glad that being able create project instruments within REDcap is now part of my skill set. This was a unique learning experience for me that I wasn’t expecting to gain. It helped me understand what needs to be done specifically in order to execute a clinical research project, such as the one I’m working on alongside my mentor.

I have also learned a little medical knowledge from reading patient charts as I’m collecting data. For example, for procedures such as intubation, I have been seeing what specific medications are being administered for the pediatric patient. It has been interesting to learn some medical details behind lifesaving procedures, before even having clinical exposure in my medical training.

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

The work on my summer project is moving along. Right now, I am collecting data from patients who had clinical deterioration events and unplanned transfers to the PICU in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital over the past year or so.

We are planning on collecting data for as many patients as possible, so we have yet to decide how far back in the timeline I will go to include patients. After that, I will focus on collecting data for age-matched control subjects. The timeline I prepared earlier was a bit ambitious, as I didn’t anticipate that data collection would consume so much time. However, the patients I am studying have several complex chronic conditions so it is understandable that it is taking more time than I thought.

My mentor has been very helpful in this process by setting up regular meetings with me and keeping communications open. He has provided me with some data from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital that identifies emergency transfer cases, as well as clinical deterioration cases. This saves me a significant amount of time and decreases the potential for errors in the data, because I don’t have to go back and decide which cases were emergency transfers on my own. We are discussing some of the exclusion criteria for the study at this point as well.

I’m enjoying this project, as it is one of my first experiences with clinical research. In addition to the research experience, I am also learning a good amount of medicine as I learn about the care given to these complex patients.
 

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

The work on my summer project is moving along. Right now, I am collecting data from patients who had clinical deterioration events and unplanned transfers to the PICU in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital over the past year or so.

We are planning on collecting data for as many patients as possible, so we have yet to decide how far back in the timeline I will go to include patients. After that, I will focus on collecting data for age-matched control subjects. The timeline I prepared earlier was a bit ambitious, as I didn’t anticipate that data collection would consume so much time. However, the patients I am studying have several complex chronic conditions so it is understandable that it is taking more time than I thought.

My mentor has been very helpful in this process by setting up regular meetings with me and keeping communications open. He has provided me with some data from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital that identifies emergency transfer cases, as well as clinical deterioration cases. This saves me a significant amount of time and decreases the potential for errors in the data, because I don’t have to go back and decide which cases were emergency transfers on my own. We are discussing some of the exclusion criteria for the study at this point as well.

I’m enjoying this project, as it is one of my first experiences with clinical research. In addition to the research experience, I am also learning a good amount of medicine as I learn about the care given to these complex patients.
 

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experience on a biweekly basis.

The work on my summer project is moving along. Right now, I am collecting data from patients who had clinical deterioration events and unplanned transfers to the PICU in Cincinnati Children’s Hospital over the past year or so.

We are planning on collecting data for as many patients as possible, so we have yet to decide how far back in the timeline I will go to include patients. After that, I will focus on collecting data for age-matched control subjects. The timeline I prepared earlier was a bit ambitious, as I didn’t anticipate that data collection would consume so much time. However, the patients I am studying have several complex chronic conditions so it is understandable that it is taking more time than I thought.

My mentor has been very helpful in this process by setting up regular meetings with me and keeping communications open. He has provided me with some data from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital that identifies emergency transfer cases, as well as clinical deterioration cases. This saves me a significant amount of time and decreases the potential for errors in the data, because I don’t have to go back and decide which cases were emergency transfers on my own. We are discussing some of the exclusion criteria for the study at this point as well.

I’m enjoying this project, as it is one of my first experiences with clinical research. In addition to the research experience, I am also learning a good amount of medicine as I learn about the care given to these complex patients.
 

Farah Hussain is a 2nd-year medical student at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care to vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experiences on a biweekly basis.

I’m a rising second year medical student working this summer on a project to determine predictors for pediatric clinical deterioration and unplanned transfers to the pediatric ICU.

We’re hoping to identify characteristics of the pediatric population that is more prone to these unplanned transfers, as well as determine what clinical signs serve as reliable warnings so that an intervention can be designed to prevent these emergency transfers.

Our objectives are twofold: describe the incidence of the transfers, as well as the clinical characteristics mentioned above, and conduct a case-control study comparing outcomes of the emergency transfer cases with matched controls.

So far, I have been searching the literature for what current interventions exist to prevent pediatric clinical deterioration. I have been reading about rapid response teams and their effectiveness in preventing codes, as well as what measures are used to evaluate the condition of a pediatric patient who is at risk for clinical deterioration. It is clear that more investigation is needed to identify reliable predictors that indicate a possible ICU transfer for the child patient.

I was interested in this project, and in quality improvement, because of its power to directly improve patient care and safety. It is vital to identify and fix problems that are preventable. It is directly related to the work of the physician, and the interprofessional collaboration aspect is key to improve communication that directly affects the patients’ outcomes.

I was introduced to the field during the past year in medical school, and this prompted me to start looking for research projects in the hospital medicine department at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. I was connected with Patrick Brady, MD, an attending physician in the division of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s, whose work involves studying patient safety. His goals of investigating how to prevent clinical deterioration in pediatric patients aligned with what I wanted to learn during my research experience.

After partnering with my primary mentor, Dr. Brady, we discussed how the Student Hospitalist Scholar Grant would be a good fit for me, so I decided to apply.

I am excited to continue this experience this summer, as I believe it would not only educate me about applying interventions to better patient care but also about medicine in general. I plan to carry on and apply these lessons learned during my third year of medical school for rotations.

Farah Hussain is a second year medical student at the University of Cincinnati and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care in vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experiences on a biweekly basis.

I’m a rising second year medical student working this summer on a project to determine predictors for pediatric clinical deterioration and unplanned transfers to the pediatric ICU.

We’re hoping to identify characteristics of the pediatric population that is more prone to these unplanned transfers, as well as determine what clinical signs serve as reliable warnings so that an intervention can be designed to prevent these emergency transfers.

Our objectives are twofold: describe the incidence of the transfers, as well as the clinical characteristics mentioned above, and conduct a case-control study comparing outcomes of the emergency transfer cases with matched controls.

So far, I have been searching the literature for what current interventions exist to prevent pediatric clinical deterioration. I have been reading about rapid response teams and their effectiveness in preventing codes, as well as what measures are used to evaluate the condition of a pediatric patient who is at risk for clinical deterioration. It is clear that more investigation is needed to identify reliable predictors that indicate a possible ICU transfer for the child patient.

I was interested in this project, and in quality improvement, because of its power to directly improve patient care and safety. It is vital to identify and fix problems that are preventable. It is directly related to the work of the physician, and the interprofessional collaboration aspect is key to improve communication that directly affects the patients’ outcomes.

I was introduced to the field during the past year in medical school, and this prompted me to start looking for research projects in the hospital medicine department at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. I was connected with Patrick Brady, MD, an attending physician in the division of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s, whose work involves studying patient safety. His goals of investigating how to prevent clinical deterioration in pediatric patients aligned with what I wanted to learn during my research experience.

After partnering with my primary mentor, Dr. Brady, we discussed how the Student Hospitalist Scholar Grant would be a good fit for me, so I decided to apply.

I am excited to continue this experience this summer, as I believe it would not only educate me about applying interventions to better patient care but also about medicine in general. I plan to carry on and apply these lessons learned during my third year of medical school for rotations.

Farah Hussain is a second year medical student at the University of Cincinnati and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care in vulnerable populations.

 

Editor’s Note: The Society of Hospital Medicine’s (SHM’s) Physician in Training Committee launched a scholarship program in 2015 for medical students to help transform health care and revolutionize patient care. The program has been expanded for the 2017-2018 year, offering two options for students to receive funding and engage in scholarly work during their first, second, and third years of medical school. As a part of the program, recipients are required to write about their experiences on a biweekly basis.

I’m a rising second year medical student working this summer on a project to determine predictors for pediatric clinical deterioration and unplanned transfers to the pediatric ICU.

We’re hoping to identify characteristics of the pediatric population that is more prone to these unplanned transfers, as well as determine what clinical signs serve as reliable warnings so that an intervention can be designed to prevent these emergency transfers.

Our objectives are twofold: describe the incidence of the transfers, as well as the clinical characteristics mentioned above, and conduct a case-control study comparing outcomes of the emergency transfer cases with matched controls.

So far, I have been searching the literature for what current interventions exist to prevent pediatric clinical deterioration. I have been reading about rapid response teams and their effectiveness in preventing codes, as well as what measures are used to evaluate the condition of a pediatric patient who is at risk for clinical deterioration. It is clear that more investigation is needed to identify reliable predictors that indicate a possible ICU transfer for the child patient.

I was interested in this project, and in quality improvement, because of its power to directly improve patient care and safety. It is vital to identify and fix problems that are preventable. It is directly related to the work of the physician, and the interprofessional collaboration aspect is key to improve communication that directly affects the patients’ outcomes.

I was introduced to the field during the past year in medical school, and this prompted me to start looking for research projects in the hospital medicine department at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. I was connected with Patrick Brady, MD, an attending physician in the division of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s, whose work involves studying patient safety. His goals of investigating how to prevent clinical deterioration in pediatric patients aligned with what I wanted to learn during my research experience.

After partnering with my primary mentor, Dr. Brady, we discussed how the Student Hospitalist Scholar Grant would be a good fit for me, so I decided to apply.

I am excited to continue this experience this summer, as I believe it would not only educate me about applying interventions to better patient care but also about medicine in general. I plan to carry on and apply these lessons learned during my third year of medical school for rotations.

Farah Hussain is a second year medical student at the University of Cincinnati and student researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Her research interests involve bettering patient care in vulnerable populations.