Evidence-Based Skin Champion Program Reduces Pressure Injuries in a Pediatric Hospital

Prevention of pressure injuries (PIs) in pediatric patients is an important nurse-sensitive quality goal. The PI rate at a large urban pediatric hospital triggered a call to action by the Chief Nursing Officer to establish a Hospital Acquired PI (HAPI) Task Force which identified the Skin Champion program as a key improvement strategy. The goals of the Skin Champion program are to lower the rate of HAPIs, empower front line care providers to implement evidence-based care bundles, achieve consistency of practice, and provide resource availability at the point of care. The implementation of the Skin Champion quality improvement program achieved an 85% reduction in severe harm and “reportable HAPI incidence, which is lower than the HAPI national average in pediatric patients (Solutions for Patient Safety, 2018), and an increase in nurse compliance with the HAPI prevention bundle. The HAPI incidence rate has remained near 0.05 per 1000 patient days

AVEID: Automatic Video System for Measuring Engagement In Dementia

Engagement in dementia is typically measured using behavior observational scales (BOS) that are tedious and involve intensive manual labor to annotate, and are therefore not easily scalable. We propose AVEID, a low cost and easy-to-use video-based engagement measurement tool to determine the engagement level of a person with dementia (PwD) during digital interaction. We show that the objective behavioral measures computed via AVEID correlate well with subjective expert impressions for the popular MPES and OME BOS, confirming its viability and effectiveness. Moreover, AVEID measures can be obtained for a variety of engagement designs, thereby facilitating large-scale studies with PwD populations

Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC): Building a Community Focused on Sharing Ideas and Best Practices to Improve Cancer Care and Patient Outcomes.

Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers (CI4CC) is a grassroots, nonprofit 501c3 organization intended to provide a focused national forum for engagement of senior cancer informatics leaders, primarily aimed at academic cancer centers anywhere in the world but with a special emphasis on the 70 National Cancer Institute-funded cancer centers. Although each of the participating cancer centers is structured differently, and leaders' titles vary, we know firsthand there are similarities in both the issues we face and the solutions we achieve. As a consortium, we have initiated a dedicated listserv, an open-initiatives program, and targeted biannual face-to-face meetings. These meetings are a place to review our priorities and initiatives, providing a forum for discussion of the strategic and pragmatic issues we, as informatics leaders, individually face at our respective institutions and cancer centers. Here we provide a brief history of the CI4CC organization and meeting highlights from the latest CI4CC meeting that took place in Napa, California from October 14-16, 2019. The focus of this meeting was "intersections between informatics, data science, and population science." We conclude with a discussion on "hot topics" on the horizon for cancer informatics