Current care patterns for patients with acute chest pain fail to provide optimal quality and value. To avoid missing acute
coronary syndrome (ACS), emergency physicians hospitalize >50% of patients who present to the Emergency Department with
chest pain. However, <10% are ultimately diagnosed with ACS, and this pervasive overtriage
costs $1013
billion annually.
The HEART Pathway, which was developed at Wake Forest Baptist Health (WFBH), is designed to improve care for patients with
chest pain. It uses a validated clinical decision aid and serial troponin measures to provide realtime
decision support to providers.
In our prior studies, the HEART Pathway decreased hospitalizations, stress testing, and hospital length of stay, without
increasing adverse events. These studies led to a learning health system project in collaboration with insurers, in which the
HEART Pathway was fully integrated into the WFBH EHR. Preliminary results demonstrate further reductions in hospitalizations
and stress testing. Given WFBH's success with the HEART Pathway, the next logical step is regional dissemination.
This project will leverage Carolinas Collaborative infrastructure to collect data specific to the HEART Pathway from all 4 health
systems, establishing rates of healthcare utilization and ACS outcomes for Emergency Department patients with chest pain in
the Carolinas. In addition, we will engage key stakeholders at each health system to develop an implementation strategy. This
proposal builds on our prior work and will provide pilot data essential for a larger grant application that will support rigorous
testing and implementation of the HEART Pathway across Carolinas Collaborative health systems.
Transforming health care and outcomes for children with rare diseases is difficult within the current health care system. There is great variation in care delivery, inadequate and slow application of existing evidence, and ineffective use of available data to generate new knowledge. Individual care centers have inadequate numbers of patients for robust learning and improvement. In order to redesign the system, changes must take place at multiple levels, including the patient and family, clinician, practice and the network. The purpose of this project is to design, develop, and test further refinements to an improvement and research network focused on HLHS, the most severe congenital heart defect, and to use a registry to simultaneously improve clinical care, redesign care delivery systems and to conduct quality improvement, health services, outcomes, and comparative effectiveness research. The purpose of this initiative, specifically, is to improve care and outcomes for infants with HLHS by: 1) expanding the established NPC-QIC national registry to gather clinical care process, outcome, and developmental data on infants with HLHS between diagnosis and 12 months of age, 2) improving implementation of consensus standards, tested by teams, into everyday practice across pediatric cardiology centers, and 3) engaging parents as partners in improving care and outcomes. We utilize a quality improvement methodology, known as the adapted learning collaborative model, which expedites the implementation of tools and strategies that facilitate changes such as systematic care coordination, cardiovascular monitoring, and nutritional monitoring into every day practice. The NPC-QIC registry is used to document the impact of these changes on various care processes and outcomes (e.g., mortality rate, readmissions, and weight gain).
PEPPER is a randomized study comparing the three most commonly used blood thinners in North America in patients who have elected to undergo primary or revision hip or knee joint replacement surgery. The blood thinners being compared are enteric coated aspirin, low intensity warfarin, and rivaroxaban.
IntacsĀ® Corneal Implants is a FDA Humanitarian Use Device (HUD) designed for the reduction or elimination of myopia and astigmatism in patients with keratoconus.
The purpose of this study is to create and maintain a registry, which is a database (a searchable collection of information) about children, adolescents and young adults with pediatric onset of rheumatic diseases. This data may help in the evaluation of the safety and benefit of medications that are prescribed to patients who have rheumatic diseases.
This study is for patients that have been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) . The investigational drug in this study is AG-120. The purpose of this study is to identify and test the highest dose of AG-120 that can be given safely. Participants can expect to be in the study for as long as the study doctor feels it is in the participants best interest.
Reflexes are important parts of our movements. When reflexes are not working well, movements are clumsy or even impossible. After stroke, reflex responses may change. Researchers have found that people can learn to increase or decrease a reflex response with training. Recently, we have found that rats and people with partial spinal cord injuries can walk better after they are trained to change a spinal cord reflex. Thus, learning to change a reflex response may help people recover after a nervous system injury. In this study, we aim to examine whether learning to change a spinal reflex through operant conditioning training can improve movement function recovery in people after stroke or other damage to the nervous system.
With this research study, we want to learn if methylphenidate (RitalinĀ® and others) helps people with Alzheimer's disease and apathy (lack of interest or concern for things that others find moving or exciting).
The primary objective of Enroll-HD is to develop a comprehensive repository of prospective and systematically collected clinical research data (demography, clinical features, family history, genetic characteristics) and biological specimens (blood) from individuals with manifest HD, unaffected individuals known to carry the HD mutation or at risk of carrying the HD mutation, and control research participants (e.g., spouses, siblings or offspring of HD mutation carriers known not to carry the HD mutation). Enroll-HD is conceived as a broad-based and long-term project to maximize the efficiencies of non-clinical research and participation in clinical research while ensuring privacy and protections for consenting research participants.
Reflexes are important parts of our movements. When reflexes are not working well, movements are clumsy or even impossible. Researchers have found that people can learn to increase or decrease a reflex response with training. Recently, we have found that rats with spinal cord injuries can walk better after they are trained to change a spinal cord reflex. Thus, learning to change a reflex response may help people recover after a nervous system injury. We are currently studying effects of spinal cord reflex training (e.g., a knee jerk reflex) in people in early adulthood. We hope that the results of this study will help us develop spinal reflex training as a new treatment to help people in early adulthood recover better after spinal cord injury or other damage to the nervous system.