The Adult & Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine has had many accomplishments this year including the announcement of ACCORDS' new director Jerica Berge, PhD, MPH, our work to help dispense lifesaving drugs to young adults, examining publication bias, and the launching of a new core.
These are the top stories of 2023 for ACCORDS:
Jerica Berge, PhD, MPH, has been named director of the Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, effective January 1, 2024. She will also hold a faculty appointment as professor in the Department of Family Medicine and the associate director of child outcomes research at Children’s Hospital Colorado. She will have secondary appointments in pediatrics and public health.
Nicole Wagner, PhD, a recent graduate of the ACCORDS K12 Impact scholar program, is using a career development award to broaden access to naloxone through vending machines. The medication is easy to administer and rapidly reverses overdoses, making it easy for bystanders to save lives.
“The goal is to help identify features of the environment that are influencing whether services are used,” she said. “It's about understanding what's appealing and what's not appealing to people who are using substances in the community.”
“The difficult thing about sepsis is, there's no test that's ever been developed that finds everyone who will become critically ill without finding too many other patients. If we gave them all antibiotics, we would be overusing them. If we hospitalized them all, we would be hospitalizing too many kids, which results in harm for patients and harm for the system. But we never want to miss a single case of sepsis.”
Halden Scott, MD, was in training in the early 2000s and found inspiration in the work being done around sepsis in adult populations at that time. Today she’s a pediatric emergency medicine physician, providing clinical care at the various campuses of Children's Hospital Colorado. Her research is dedicated to better understanding which patients are at the highest risk of developing sepsis and discovering the protocols and interventions that are most effective at prevention.
A team of researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus collaborated to analyze publication trends in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management and found disparities in acceptance rates.
As part of its ongoing efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, JPSM solicited an external evaluation of their publication data to investigate evidence of bias in their publication decisions. A group of CU Anschutz researchers responded and were elected to conduct the evaluation. Jean Kutner, MD, MPH, MSPH, professor of medicine and chief medical officer for UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, brought together a team that included Kathryn Colborn, PhD, MSPH, associate professor in the Division of Health Care Policy and Research at the CU School of Medicine and ACCORDS Biostatistics and Analytics Core director; Maurice "Scotty" Scott, MD, assistant professor of medicine; Katherine Morrison, MD, associate professor of medicine; Riley Gillette, a data analyst at ACCORDS; and Ben Harnke, MLIS, an education and research informationist from Strauss Health Sciences Library.
ACCORDS is expanding its assistance for investigators to help improve the delivery of care for patients. The new Learning Health Systems (LHS) core, directed by Michael Ho, MD, PhD, professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, will use data and analytics to generate knowledge, engage partners, and implement electronic health records (EHR)-based behavior change interventions to transform clinical practices.
“The LHS core will aid investigators on that journey toward these aspirational outcomes,” Ho says. “An attribute of a learning health system is that it can be more responsive than traditional research. This helps to address the lag time between evidence generation and application of knowledge into health care delivery.”