The 2019 AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting’s poster sessions offered more than 1600 posters sprawled across the Walter E. Washington Convention Center’s massive Exhibit Hall. In her comments during the opening plenary, Eve Kerr, MD, MPH, Chair of the ARM 2019 Planning Committee, reported on how the organization is working to more accurately quantify the gender, race and ethnicity of its membership. She said the latest tally shows 60% of AcademyHealth’s members are women and that a majority of the event’s 546 speakers were also female. And while there were no hard numbers available on it, the poster sessions, at least visually, appeared to mirror that demographic. Another trend across the poster hall was the widespread adoption of the new #Betterposter format created by Michigan State University PhD student Mike Morrison featuring huge, brightly colored center graphics.
University of Pennsylvania Nursing School RWJF Future of Nursing Scholar and LDI Associate Fellow Amelia Schlak, BSN, RN, explains her project on a hospital intervention for improving the quality of end-of-life care. “We knew magnet hospitals are known for excellence in nursing care, but we didn’t know anything about the magnet relationship to end-of-life care,” she said. “Overall, we found that magnet hospitals are slightly better at end-of-life but could still improve a lot.”
Kirstin Manges, PhD, Penn National Clinician Scholar and LDI Associate Fellow at her poster detailing the same study of “Shared Mental Models” for clinical teams that was the subject of her separate podium presentation. See LDI companion photo feature on ARM events
Penn Perelman School of Medicine Instructor of Medicine and LDI Senior Fellow Shazia Siddique, MD, MSHP, and Division of Gastroenterology Fellow Sonali Palchaudhuri, MD, explain their project about understanding and improving inpatient endoscopy daily workflow.
Perelman Instructor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and LDI Senior Fellow Gary Weissman, MD, MSHP, said “There’s a lot of excitement and hype around predictive modeling and artificial intelligence, but very little data about the benefits and even less data about the potential harms. We built a model to predict 30-day heart failure readmissions and found the model performed better among whites than non-whites.”
Penn National Clinician Scholar George Dalembert, MD, had a poster about a study on pediatric health care quality and equity in the patient-centered medical home model. “We found that the medical home is better for quality but actually doesn’t show any significant difference in terms of health equity when you look at racial and ethnic groups.”
Wharton School Health Care Management PhD student and LDI Associate Fellow Molly Frean talks with Dartmouth Institute Research Project Manager Alex Mainor, JD, MPH, about her poster project comparing patient experiences in Medicare fee-for-service, fee-for-service within an ACO, and Medicare Advantage insurance programs.
Penn Medicine resident Rebecca Anastos-Wallen, MD, chats about her poster with Andrew Potter, PhD, of the Political Science Department at California State University at Chico. Working with Penn Medicine Professor and LDI Executive Director Rachel Werner, MD, PhD, and Assistant Professor and LDI Senior Fellow Paula Chatterjee, MD, MPH, Anastos-Wallen looked at the Balancing Incentive Program for informal caregivers and found “in states that adopted this program, informal caregivers provided more care but also had improved quality of life as measured through sleep.”
Philadelphia Crescenz VA Medical Center Professor and LDI Senior Fellow Marilyn Schapira, MD, MPH, speaks with Salar Khaleghzadegan, MPP, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine about her poster. It details a project that brought together multidisciplinary experts in an effort to reach consensus on the definition of basic terms for value-based care, population health and value-based payment. While agreement was reached on the last item, the first two remain an unresolved challenge.
Predoctoral Fellow at the Penn Nursing School’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR), and LDI Associate Fellow Rachel French, BSN, RN, said the goal of her project was to “examine nurse specialty certification to see what could make a nurse more or less likely to become certified.”
CHOPR Predoctoral Fellow and LDI Associate Fellow Kathryn Riman’s study analyzed the differences between freestanding children’s hospitals solely dedicated to pediatrics and the pediatric units of larger, general hospitals. “We found that freestanding children’s hospitals have higher safety ratings, better quality ratings, and more pain and palliative care programs,” she said.
Nursing School CHOPR Postdoctoral Research Fellow and LDI Associate Fellow Heather Brom, PhD, RN, NP-C, used machine learning techniques in a three-month medical records project at a safety net hospital to identify and tailor care for ED patients most at risk of readmission.
Working with LDI Senior Fellows Eve Higginbotham, SM, MD, and Jaya Aysola, MD, MPH, Perelman School Office of Inclusion and Diversity Research Coordinator Dominique Alexis studied perceived disparities in treatment among health care professionals.
Patients are more likely to avoid the ICU after surgery if they are in hospitals with better nursing resources, said the poster of National Clinical Scholar, Postdoctoral CHOPR Fellow and LDI Associate Fellow Anna Krupp, PhD, MS, RN. Her project looked at the nursing work environment and surgical patients in 453 hospitals across the country.
Penn Master of Science in Health Policy Research (MSHP) student, School of Nursing Postdoctoral Fellow, and LDI Associate Fellow Ashley Ritter, PhD, CRNP talks with Parth Modi, MD, MS, of the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI) at the University of Michigan about her study of the terms and costs of required Nurse Practitioner collaborative practicing agreements.
