Health Analytics Council (HAC)

Problem Central Line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) not only cause both morbidity and mortality in patients, they also increase healthcare costs with complexity of care and increased length of stay. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is a large, tertiary care pediatric healthcare system. Because of volume and subspecialty patients, Children’s cares for a significant number of patients who have central lines. While Children’s employs evidence-based bloodstream infection prevention practices to reduce or eliminate these infections, CLABSI still occur.

Ideally, a more accurate early identification and clinical alerting of CLABSI risk would drive targeted, enhanced prevention practices for patients identified as increased risk. Given the burden to both patients and the healthcare system, even a modest reduction in CLABSI rates would having meaningful and lasting impact.  

Proposals from researchers are sought for the following 3 categories:

1) Data identification, extraction, and harmonization to support CLABSI predictive modeling.  This may include use of structured, unstructured, or other data sources.  In order to support the project’s second and third phases, transformation of data into the OMOP common data model is preferred. Data should be made available to researchers for the project’s second phase.

2) Predictive model development to assess individual patient risk for CLABSI at time of admission and then daily throughout hospitalization. Relevant clinical data for model development will be made available in harmonized form using a standardized data format such as OMOP.  Expected output will be both model performance characteristics as well as a runnable model that can ingest clinical data in the provided format and return an individualized CLABSI risk prediction.

3) CLABSI Risk Decision Support application. The clinical decision support application should be able to retrieve patient information from CHOA’s Epic system at point of care, convert those data to the format used for predictive model generation, and display individual patient CLABSI risk to the clinician based on the model developed in phase two.  In additional to the technical strategy, describing the requirements gathering, prototyping, and UX design approach is highly encouraged. 

Timeline: Proposers should provide anticipated timeframe to conduct the project as well as major milestones in this process. Project should be completed in 12-24 months.

Proposal Due Date: February 7th, 2018

Anticipated Start Date: March 1st, 2018

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Up to $75,000 for each category.  A single team may propose for multiple categories.  Coordination amongst proposing teams ahead of submission is encouraged by not required.

Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the CHOA/GT IP agreement which covers research funded by this mechanism. An overview of the agreement is appended below.

All applications must involve two or more investigators:

• at least one from Georgia Tech and
• at least one of whom:

            -  has a primary faculty appointment in the Emory Department of Pediatrics

OR

• is on the professional staff at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA). This includes those Emory faculty outside of the Department of Pediatrics who are on CHOA medical staff and all non-faculty clinicians who are on CHOA medical staff.

• Georgia Tech faculty applicants who have previously received funding from CHOA sources (through the Center for Pediatric Nanomedicine, the Center for Pediatric Innovation, or the Center for Transforming Pediatric Healthcare Delivery) are required to have fulfilled the terms of the prior award (reporting and application for extramural funding) in order to be eligible. Applications are strongly encouraged from faculty who have not previously received CPN, CPI, or CTPHD support.

The principal investigator(s) must:

• Submit a progress report to the center director within six months of the end date of the pilot project.
• Submit a related application for extramural funding within one year of the end date of the pilot project.
• Proposal budgets must include administrative support and data support as needed. Please contact Erin Henderson (erin.henderson@ptc.gatech.edu) for guidance prior to submission.

Erin Henderson, Research Project and Grants Manager
erin.henderson@ptc.gatech.edu or 404-894-9785