PCCI Sachs Summer Scholar Makes Forbes 30 Under 30 List
In its recently released 30 Under 30 List, Forbes Magazine included Meghna “Chili” Pramoda in its Education section for her part in helping found SafeTeensOnline. Pramoda was a member of PCCI’s 2022 class of Sachs Summer Scholars interns, a program focused on advancing women in data science. During her term, Pramoda and a partner worked with PCCI data scientists for their research on using Safegraph Visualization in PCCI’s Community Vulnerability Compass. To view her and her partner’s end of term presentation, go to the 1 hour, 8 minute mark of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3BJ3EZJoE4
In the Forbes article on Pramoda, she is lauded for developing a system to support her peers in owning their online presence, from Forbes:
Founded by Vinny Veeramachaneni in 2017 and now spearheaded by cofounders Meghna “Chili” Pramoda and her sister Siona “Dolly” Pramoda, SafeTeensOnline is a nonprofit that offers English and Spanish language education on digital safety, in addition to courses in coding and ethical hacking. The Pramoda sisters created STOCyberReady, an app that helps teens understand the impact of their digital choices by analyzing their cyber risk and offering educational tips to reduce risk. The app is currently being used in 34 schools with a tentative public release set for 2024. SafeTeensOnline has partnered with the Taco Bell Foundation, T-Mobile, and the Department of Homeland Security.
PCCI at the 2024 Healthcare Analytics Summit (HAS)
PCCI leaders will be presenting at this week’s 2024 Healthcare Analytics Summit (HAS) in Salt Lake City, Utah. In its tenth year, HAS 24 is the premier event showcasing data and analytics’ critical role in tackling some of healthcare’s greatest challenges. Join healthcare’s do-ers, hard workers, believers, game-changers, and impact-makers in Salt Lake City to leverage our collective expertise and experience to Imagine, Innovate, and Impact healthcare.
On Thursday, February 29 at the 9:10 a.m. to 10 a.m. breakout session, PCCI’s Yolande Pengetnze, MD, Vice President, Clinical Leadership and Parkland Health’s Teresita Oaks, Director, Community Health Programs will present information on Parkland’s groundbreaking pediatric asthma program.
Program overview
“AI-DRIVEN OUTREACH REDUCES HEALTH INEQUITIES AND IMPROVES ASTHMA CONTROL”
Asthma prevalence is surging, especially among children, with one in 12 children in the U.S. having asthma. Racial/ethnic disparities are concerning, as Black and Hispanic children experience higher asthma hospitalization rates than white children.
PCCI and Parkland Health leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce inequities for low-income pediatric patients with asthma. Analyzing diverse data sets, teams identified those at risk for asthma-related emergency department visits (ED) and hospitalizations. Collaborating with interdisciplinary community coalitions, they launched interventions: community outreach, asthma screening and referrals, digital outreach, home visits, and risk-driven clinical support. The interventions impacted thousands of patients and improved outcomes – home visits improved asthma symptom control by 26%, and digital patient engagement reduced ED visits for lower-asthma-related issues by 36%.
At the 10:20 a.m. to 11:10 a.m. breakout session, PCCI’s CEO, Steve Miff, PhD, joins a panel of experts to discuss how to bridge the gap of healthcare disparities.
Program Overview
FROM INTENT TO IMPACT: USING DATA TO DECREASE CLINICAL DISPARITIES AND CREATE HEALTHY COMMUNITIES
The economic burden of healthcare disparities in the United States is nearing $1 trillion and negatively affects millions of lives. However, there is a path forward, using data and analytics to understand the affected patient populations and the root causes of the issues.
Join this session to gain insights from a panel of industry experts. Learn how they have connected the community to the issue to improve overall health, created clinically focused equity platform and partnership, built a cohort of equity-focused partners, and more. This session will be particularly impactful if you lead quality, clinical improvements, or data science efforts.
Suicide, a lack of psychiatric bed capacity, lack of access to psychiatry services, and other challenges are all too real in today’s healthcare environment. Using technology, however, to facilitate rapid diagnosis, treatment, and identification of resources is a welcomed relief to patients and clinicians alike. With a focus on various technologies, attendees will realize the difference that technology makes in the lives of patients and their families.
SPEAKERS:
Jacqueline Naeem, MD, Senior Medical Director at PCCI
While 80-85 percent of sepsis cases present within the first 48 hours of admission (ED), they have lower mortality (5-10 percent) as compared to 15-20 percent of cases that present later and have higher mortality (15-30 percent). To better (and earlier) identify sepsis cases not present on admission, at a large safety-net hospital, an end-to-end early sepsis prediction and response workflow was created in the inpatient setting. First, an ML model was built to predict the risk of a patient becoming septic in real-time. Next, the model baked into clinical workflows through FHIR APIs to make the model actionable at point of care. The model accesses EMR every 15 minutes and alerts the care providers when the risk exceeds a certain threshold, which can be tailored to local populations. Finally, an EHR-integrated decision support app (ISLET) was added to enable clinicians to easily view and understand model output to improve actionability. Prediction, alerting, visualizing the root causes and acting on the case completes the workflow. This full workflow has been running for thousands of patients every 15 minutes in the last year. This session will focus on the challenges, achievements and impact of this workflow on healthcare outcomes.
SPEAKERS:
George Oliver, MD, PhD, Vice President, Clinical Informatics at PCCI
Nainesh Shah, Assistant Professor, Health Informatician at Parkland Health
Yusuf Tamer, Principal Data and Applied Scientist at PCCI
The presenters built an AI- ML-driven pediatric asthma surveillance system (PASS) to monitor the clinical and social risk of pediatric asthma at the census tract level in Dallas County. First, they developed a novel AI/ML pediatric asthma risk index, combining clinical and social risk factors from multiple data sources to accurately predict census-tract risk of asthma-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations. Subsequent analyses identified actionable risk drivers which, combined with the novel asthma risk index, painted a wholesome, countywide picture of pediatric asthma risk disparities. PASS is an interactive, community-facing dashboard that maps and compares the distribution of the asthma risk index and other risk drivers across Dallas County. PASS is hosted on the Dallas County Health and Human Services website and is readily accessible to community stakeholders. Launched in January 2023, PASS was introduced to the community through training sessions and dissemination events to engage key stakeholders. PASS is being leveraged to advance health equity through diverse use cases ranging from environmental advocacy to city planning, clinical resources deployment, school-based interventions and corporate social responsibility. Lessons learned from PASS provide a blueprint for other scalable AI/ML-driven chronic disease surveillance systems such as diabetes and hypertension.
SPEAKERS:
Teresita Oaks, Director, Community Health Programs at Parkland Health
Yolande Pengetnze, MD, Vice President, Clinical Leadership at PCCI
Yusuf Tamer, PhD, Principal Data and Applied Scientist at PCCI
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) defines workplace violence (WPV) as any act or threat of physical violence, harassment, intimidation or other threatening disruptive behavior occurring at work. Healthcare and social service workers are five times more likely to be injured than other workers and WPV rates continue to rise. Due in part to poor reporting systems, and the common misperception that violent events should be expected while working in healthcare, prevention measures rarely match the issue’s severity and often go unreported. This session will focus on efforts, in a large safety-net hospital, to address an important gap impacting WPV prevention efforts through the development of a predictive model to more accurately identify―in an inpatient healthcare setting―potentially violent patients, thus enabling healthcare workers to mitigate risks of impending WPV incidents.
SPEAKERS:
Karen Garvey, Vice President, Safety and Clinical Risk Management at Parkland Health
Alex Treacher, PhD, Senior Data and Applied Scientist at PCCI
Reshma Suresh, MS/MA, Data and Applied Scientist at PCCI
U.S. suicide rates increased by 27.6 percent over the past 15 years and suicide remains a leading U.S. cause of death, with 48,183 deaths in 2021, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics and the United Health Foundation. Development of evidence-based practices has dramatically increased over the past 20 years; however, suicide rates continue to increase in part due to broad variability in adoption of, and consistent adherence to, suicide prevention practices. As a vital first step in understanding suicide prevention from a population health perspective, and improving risk recognition for treatment application, a large safety-net hospital implemented a universal suicide screening program (SSP) in 2015, in which all patients ages 10 and older are screened for suicide risk during every provider encounter. This session will determine if the SSP reduces the number of patients falsely identified as not at risk of death by suicide in our cohort by linking mortality data to healthcare utilization data from five years pre- and post- SSP implementation. Despite suicide being a relatively low base-rate event (13-14/100,000 in the U.S.), the massive dataset size provides enough power for statistically meaningful changes to be detected.
SPEAKERS:
Jacqueline Naeem, MD, Senior Medical Director at PCCI
Alex Treacher, PhD, Senior Data and Applied Scientist at PCCI
PCCI Releases New Annual Impact Report Covering Highlights from 2023
Today PCCI has released its 2023 Annual Impact Report, demonstrating its value to the communities and individuals it serves.
To view and download the PCCI 2023 Annual Impact Report, click HERE.
The report offers insights into a few of the most impactful PCCI’s innovative programs, such as the launch of the Community Vulnerability Compass; our efforts to reduce the harm caused by pediatric asthma with the creation of the Pediatric Asthma Surveillance System; our innovative creation of AI/ML models to support trauma patients; and the work around the state to increase equity and access to healthcare through its Connected Communities of Care initiatives.
“Last year we saw PCCI evolve to support programs statewide with impactful innovations and collaborations that benefit residents in Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio,” said PCCI CEO, Steve Miff, PhD. “We also joined leading national organizations via the Health AI Partnership to co-create and drive the ethical and meaningful applications of AI in clinical care and continue to be fully committed to helping revolutionize the way healthcare is delivered through the use of advanced data in clinical and community settings. This report gives you a peek into the broad swath of innovative work that PCCI does in support of our mission.”
About PCCI
PCCI started as a department within Parkland Health and was spun out as an independent, not-for-profit organization in 2012 to not only serve the needs of Parkland, but to also pursue additional transformative initiatives that could have a broader impact. PCCI remains tightly connected to Parkland Health, the Parkland Foundation and the Parkland Community Health Plan. Our collaborative work focuses on the needs of vulnerable populations across North Texas and beyond.
PCCI Innovation – Pediatric Asthma AI/ML program receives Kaiser Permanente grant
The Kaiser Permanente Division of Research (KP-DOR) in partnership with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has selected PCCI and Parkland Health’s AI/ML Model for Pediatric Asthma Care as one of five national programs to receive the prestigious award to advance Augmented Intelligence in Medicine and Healthcare (AIM-HI). The three-year grant is designed to evaluate the implementation of existing Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning algorithms that enhance diagnostic decision-making, identify best practices for scalability, and build capacity for effectively implementing and rigorously evaluating the use of AI/ML algorithms in real-world settings. Through a rigorous and highly competitive process involving more than 120 leading organization pioneering AI in healthcare, the five organizations were selected representing a diverse set of diagnostic areas, patient populations and clinical settings.
“We are extremely proud and excited to be selected for the Augmented Intelligence in Medicine and Healthcare Initiative,” said PCCI’s CEO, Steve Miff, PhD. “This is one of the first and most comprehensive grants to date directly focusing on scaling and rigorously evaluating the ethical and equitable applications of AI in diagnostic decision-making in real-world settings. We are looking forward to not only contributing to advance the adoption of AI in patient care using sound research methods but learning from the industry leading experts at the Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research and the pioneers in AI at the other AIM-HI peer organizations and their partners.”
PCCI and Parkland have developed and deployed an AI/ML risk prediction model leveraging EHR data to identify rising asthma risk in pediatric patients. The model generates risk reports to frontline providers and is integrated into Parkland’s EHR to trigger point-of-care alerts during outpatient visits for Very-High- or High-Risk patients. The programs also include a direct to patients and care-givers text-based engagement, education, symptom monitoring and alerting. Originally developed and deployed in collaboration with the Parkland Community Health Plan (PCHP) to support the care of Medicaid children across North Texas, the program was expanded to Parkland Health clinics in 2019 and has been highly effective in identifying rising risk patients and preventing ED and hospital admissions for asthma. (https://pccinnovation.org/parkland-program-helps-pediatric-patients-with-asthma-management/)
The AIM-HI program will test the generalizability of Parkland’s model in two additional large Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs): Los Barrios Unidos (LBU) and Foremost Family Health Centers (Foremost), which serve some of the most underserved and diverse Dallas communities.
In addition to the organizations directly involved in the AIM-HI program, PCCI and Parkland Health continue to partner with Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS) to expand the use of the new Pediatric Asthma Surveillance System (PASS) that describes community-level information regarding pediatric asthma risk factors in Dallas County. The PASS dashboard is available on the DCHHS website where families can be made aware of their local risks. (https://pccinnovation.org/new-site/pediatric-asthma-surveillance-system/)
Leading the program for PCCI include Yolande Pengetnze, MD, MS and George (Holt) Oliver, MD, PhD, with Parkland Health’s Cesar Termulo, Jr., MD, as the lead program investigator.
PCCI and Parkland have been innovators in building, deploying and testing AI/ML model for over a decade, with close to a dozen active model in production today. The pediatric asthma program supporting children with asthma in Dallas is one of these programs. To learn more about PCCI’s overall work, please view our newly released 2023 Impact Report.
PCCI CEO featured at Xtelligent Healthcare Media’s 4th Annual Payer+Provider Virtual Summit
Watch the recording of PCCI President & CEO Steve Miff, PhD, at Xtelligent Healthcare Media‘s 4th Annual Payer+Provider Virtual Summit where he shared real-world examples and best practices for combining the right people, efficient processes, and advanced technology to address the needs of underserved individuals and populations.
From the program overivew:
Collaboration between providers and payers enables the pooling of resources, expertise, and data, fostering coordinated and efficient care for communities. This unified approach, especially in value-based care models, promotes preventive health measures, streamlines processes, and addresses holistic community health needs.
PCCI Recognition: D CEO includes PCCI in the 2024 Edition of the Dallas 500
For the fourth year in a row, PCCI’s CEO, Steve Miff, PhD, has been included in the DCEO #D500 list of top leaders in North Texas. The special edition of DCEO profiles the region’s most influential business, civic, and nonprofit leaders. This honor recognizes PCCI’s impactful mission to support the health of the most vulnerable in our communities. Read more about this honor here: https://lnkd.in/gHamqvKK
Read Dr. Miff’s profile here: https://www.dmagazine.com/sponsored/2021/12/steve-miff-named-among-dallas-500-honorees/
PCCI fighting back against rising infant mortality rates
In this DCEO article, PCCI’s Yolande Pengetnze, MD, MS, FAAP, Vice President, Clinical Leadership, was quoted and PCCI (and its partners) were shown as leaders in helping support at-risk, pregnant women in the community – in the wake of new data released by the CDC. This article shows the real, positive impact of the preterm birth prevention program.
Lack of health insurance and access to prenatal care is a significant factor for infant mortality, says Dr. Yolande Pengetnze, a pediatrician at the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation. Other factors that increase infant mortality are social determinants of health, like transportation, healthy food, and childcare.
“When we see the data on infant mortality, an increase in mortality is driven by preterm delivery,” Pengetnze says. “It is mostly babies born at a gestational age of less than 24 weeks.”
PCCI has long been operating a program to target high-risk pregnant women to help them avoid preterm birth, the primary driver of infant mortality. The program helps them connect to prenatal care and overcome other barriers to seeing a provider. The Preterm Birth Intervention Program uses several factors to identify high-risk women signed up through the Parkland Community Health Program, a Medicaid managed care program. These women can sign up to receive text reminders to attend upcoming appointments and other educational interventions to prevent preterm births.
PCCI talks non-medical drivers of health data at Healthier Texas Summit
At the recent Healthier Texas Summit, Jacqueline Naeem, Senior Medical Director, Olayide Adejumobi, Associate Researcher and Guadalupe Negrete-lira, Manager, Connected Communities of Care, hosted an impactful 90-minute workshop. The session explored the potential for non-medical drivers of health (NMDOH)-related data to facilitate innovation between traditional healthcare settings and public health. During this workshop participants had the opportunity to share ideas on how to better integrate CHWs into healthcare systems, and improve collaboration.
Tech Titans Celebrates Dallas’ Vision For The Future, Honor’s PCCI’s Steve Miff
Tech Titans hosted a celebration of the past coupled with a vision for the future using the theme of “the future is now” which set the tone for the 2023 Annual Tech Titans Awards Gala presented by Dallas College at the Renaissance Dallas Plano Legacy West Hotel.
With an attendance of almost 430 people, the awards gala celebrated the achievements of 14 individuals and/or companies from the past year. This included honoring PCCI‘s CEO, Steve Miff, PhD, with Emerging Company CEO award.
