Predicting emergency department visits among children with asthma in two academic medical systems.

To develop and validate a predictive algorithm that identifies pediatric patients at risk of asthma-related emergencies, and to test whether algorithm performance can be improved in an external site via local retraining. In a retrospective cohort at the first site, data from 26 008 patients with asthma aged 2-18 years (2012-2017) were used to develop a lasso-regularized logistic regression model predicting emergency department visits for asthma within one year of a primary care encounter, known as the Asthma Emergency Risk (AER) score. Internal validation was conducted on 8634 patient encounters from 2018.

COVID-19: A Vaccine Priority Index Mapping Tool for Rapidly Assessing Priority Populations in North Carolina.

Background: The initial limited supply of COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. presented significant allocation, distribution, and delivery challenges.

Outpatient Follow-up Care After Hospital Discharge of Children With Complex Chronic Conditions at a Rural Tertiary Care Hospital.

Objective: To determine factors associated with completion of recommended outpatient follow-up visits in children with complex chronic conditions (CCCs) following hospital discharge.

Methods: We retrospectively identified children aged 1 to 17 years diagnosed with a CCC who were discharged from our rural tertiary care children's hospital between 2017 and 2018 with a diagnosis meeting published CCC criteria. Patients discharged from the neonatal intensive care unit and patients enrolled in a care coordination program for technology-dependent children were excluded.

COVID-19 Deaths in the United States: Shifts in Hot Spots over the Three Phases of the Pandemic and the Spatiotemporally Varying Impact of Pandemic Vulnerability.

The geographic areas most impacted by COVID-19 may not remain static because public health measures/behaviors change dynamically, and the impacts of pandemic vulnerability also may vary geographically and temporally. The nature of the pandemic makes spatiotemporal methods essential to understanding the distribution of COVID-19 deaths and developing interventions. This study examines the spatiotemporal trends in COVID-19 death rates in the United States from March 2020 to May 2021 by performing an emerging hot spot analysis (EHSA).

Care Coordination Program for Children With Complex Chronic Conditions Discharged From a Rural Tertiary-Care Academic Medical Center.

Objectives: Hospital discharge offers an opportunity to initiate coordination of follow-up care, preventing readmissions or emergency department (ED) recidivism. We evaluated how revisits and costs of care varied in a 12-month period between children in a care coordination program at our center (enrolled after hospital discharge with a tracheostomy or on a ventilator) and children with complex chronic condition discharges who were not enrolled.

Methods: Children ages 1 to 17 years were retrospectively included if they had a hospital discharge in 2017 with an code meeting complex chronic condition criteria or if they were in active follow-up with the care coordination program.