University of Vermont

BALTIMORE, Aug. 22, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) Dean Mark T. Gladwin, MD, announced today the appointment of Kelly Dunn, PhD, MBA, one of the nation's leading researchers on opioid use disorder, as the inaugural Director of the School's Kahlert Institute for Addiction Medicine. She will also serve as a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry with a secondary appointment in the Department of Neurobiology at UMSOM. Dr. Dunn is currently a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with a joint appointment in Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. Dr. Dunn has been the Principal Investigator on projects totaling more than $21 million in awards from the National Institutes of Health. She has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed publications in the area of substance use and opioid use disorder. The Kahlert Institute for Addiction Medicine, launched in 2023 with a major gift from the Kahlert Foundation, is uniquely positioned to bring together leading addiction experts from across basic science and clinical care to transform the prevention, treatment, education, and research of addiction. "With addiction, substance use disorder, and overdose deaths reaching epidemic proportions here in Maryland and in the U.S., we are extremely pleased to attract a top academician and leader in this field to move the Institute forward with a long-term impact," said Dean Gladwin. Growing up in rural Central New York in the late 1990's, Dr. Dunn watched several close friends become dependent on opioids, after first being exposed through prescription medications, and eventually go on to develop opioid use disorder (OUD). "This prompted my life-long passion for understanding motivations for opioid use, identifying methods to prevent the onset of OUD, and helping to improve treatments for OUD," said Dr. Dunn. "I'm honored and thrilled to take the helm of the Kahlert Institute and to work together with all of the stellar faculty who are world-class leaders in addiction research to advance the science of addiction medicine." Since 2012, Dr. Dunn has been a faculty member in the Johns Hopkins University Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit (BPRU) located within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Her current work focuses on the conduct of Phase II/III randomized controlled assessments of medications, mainly those targeted for opioid use disorder. She has also managed trials focused on treatments for cigarette smoking and alcohol use disorder and has conducted several basic science human laboratory examinations of drug effects, which is complemented by a body of work focused on epidemiological and machine-learning analyses of publicly available datasets. She has held multiple leadership roles in the substance use field, including serving as President for the American Psychological Association's Society for Psychopharmacology and Substance Use and the College on the Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) as well as Co-Editor of the Journal of Addiction Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology. "Dr. Dunn's current work in the field is impressive, " said Greg Kahlert, President of The Kahlert Foundation. "I am confident with her experience, passion and collaborative spirit, she will help find treatments and cures for those suffering from addiction. I could not be more excited that she is the first director of the Kahlert Institute for Addiction Medicine." Dr. Dunn is currently the principal investigator on a multisite examination of a treatment for co-morbid pain in people with opioid use disorder. She is also an investigator on a Phase II trial examining the use of the drug suvorexant to treat sleep disorders, withdrawal, and craving in people initiating treatment with buprenorphine for opioid use disorder. Other studies include a combination laboratory/clinical trial examining phenotypes of opioid withdrawal and a pilot trial examination of suvorexant for cocaine use in people being treated for OUD. Dr. Dunn recently completed a series of human laboratory trials examining genetic contributions to opioid sensitivity and opioid-cannabinoid interactions for pain treatment in healthy and clinical populations. In addition to her numerous peer-reviewed original and review publications, Dr. Dunn edited the Oxford Handbook on Opioids and Opioid Use Disorder. She received her PhD Degree from the University of Vermont in 2009 and earned an MBA Degree from Johns Hopkins University Carey School of Business in 2019. This news release was issued on behalf of Newswise™. For more information, visit SOURCE University of Maryland School of Medicine

Nurses at Mayo Clinic will help design and test the solution and prioritize the workflows where the AI tool will have the highest impact, according to Shiv Rao, M.D., CEO and founder of Abridge. Abridge has spent the last six years building generative AI tools to help doctors with medical documentation and is now putting that technology in the hands of hospital nurses.  In collaboration with Mayo Clinic and health IT giant Epic, Abridge rolled out a generative AI ambient documentation workflow for nurses. Abridge's new product integrates into existing Epic inpatient nursing workflows, according to the company. The product was developed as part of Abridge's participation in the Epic Workshop program, which was announced last year. The Workshop program features third-party vendors who are co-developing technology with Epic.  Nurses at Mayo will help design and test the solution and prioritize the workflows where the AI tool will have the highest impact, according to Shiv Rao, M.D., CEO and founder of Abridge. "Nurses are the scaffolding of the healthcare system. Being able to serve them now with cutting edge technology that can unburden them to focus on the thing that actually gives them energy, which is patient care," Rao, a cardiologist, said in an interview. "I'm excited about these coming weeks, but also these coming months as we start to not only measure the impact of this technology, but hopefully also scale across the healthcare system." The company, one of Fierce Healthcare's Fierce 15 of 2024 honorees, uses AI to increase the speed and accuracy of medical note-taking, leveraging a proprietary data set derived from more than 1.5 million medical encounters. The company's AI converts a patient-clinician conversation into a structured clinical note draft in real time and integrates it seamlessly into the EMR. Abridge was founded on the premise that clinician-patient conversations are at the core of all healthcare, Rao said in a previous interview with Fierce Healthcare. His family's own journey through the healthcare system also made him aware of the need for better communication, and he saw an opportunity to use technology to improve the gap between healthcare conversations and what happens next. Motivated by personal and professional experiences, Rao worked together with Florian Metze, Ph.D., and Sandeep Konam to launch Abridge in 2018. Abridge says its technology can now support more than 14 languages and 50+ specialties. In February, the company picked up a $150 million series C financing round, which includes a strategic investment from NVIDIA. The company has raised $212.5 million to date. Abridge's generative AI-powered platform has been deployed at the University of Vermont Health System, Christus Health, UChicago Medicine, Sutter Health, Yale New Haven Health System, UCI Health, Emory Healthcare, The University of Kansas Health System, UPMC, and dozens of other health systems. Abridge designed the new product to fit nurses' unique workflows, which often encompass a fast-paced, continuous and wide-ranging scope of activities, potentially involving several patients and hundreds of tasks. "As a doctor, when I see a patient, I might have a conversation and then I write a note that is really a narrative; I'm capturing the story of the patient," Rao said. "The nurses have to capture narratives, but they also have to do so much more. They're capturing vital signs, for example, they are documenting work that they have to do from a safety perspective, like turning a patient in an ICU. There's so much that they have to do that also goes into different spots in the medical record. There are flow sheets, but there's notes that they write and vital signs that they might capture on a patient. There's a unique complexity to their workflows. That amounts to a new user experience that we're working backwards from." A nurse's day-to-day tasks can involve patient and team-based communication, clinical notetaking and data capture. Mayo Clinic nursing staff are at the center of the collaboration, said Ryannon Frederick, M.S., R.N., chief nursing officer at Mayo Clinic. “We are engaging them directly in the development of this technology to ensure its use meets the unique needs of nursing and patient care workflows along with regulatory requirements for ambient solutions. We are thrilled to bring the knowledge and expertise of our nursing staff to help shape the future of documentation, where documentation could happen automatically and organically," Frederick said in a statement. Rao noted that developing the product with Epic was critical to integrate into its EHR and inpatient nursing workflows. "I think that the complexity, in some ways, is greater from an integration perspective than the complexity of integrating a doctor's note into the medical record. Nurses do all the things, they take histories, they take vital signs, they perform actions, so there's just so many different workflows that we need to account for," he said. "Now certainly, we need to focus and prioritize, but being able to get that data back into the medical record, being able to really be fluid and be a seamless part of those workflows, we would not be able to do that without these incredible partners." Rao did not specify how many nurses at Mayo Clinic would initially test out the technology. "The way Mayo is thinking about this is to be responsible in the way we deploy this, but also be prepared to scale this quickly at the right time," he said. Mayo Clinic's goal is to get the tool into the hands of nurses before the end of the year, noted Edwina Bhaskaran, M.S.N., R.N., chief clinical systems and informatics officer at Mayo Clinic, in a press release. The AI-based nursing product will help address the growing administrative burden on nurses, Rao noted. "I think over the years, there have been a number of ways that folks have thought about building tools for nurses in the voice space. I'd say a lot of those tools probably have to do with dictation-oriented technologies, with voice commands. We're thinking from a first principles perspective around what kind of user experience and underlying AI technology will unburden the those nurses the most and what will allow them to really focus on the patient in front of them. That's a high bar to be able to meet," Rao said. He added, "We're making this announcement with Mayo and Epic and we're very, very bullish. What's so exciting about this moment is being able to bring the most cutting-edge technology to the folks who could really use it the most. Often, we see that it takes a longer time for technologies to reach those folks. This is a moment to really recognize that we need to to expedite these technologies or prioritize the people who can benefit the most and where nurses are at the top of our list." The collaboration combines Abridge's AI tech, Epic's development and Mayo Clinic's nursing practice expertise and will enable the health system to "develop and iterate on the technology to meet the nursing workforce and patients' needs," Bhaskaran said. "This technology will be shaped using the expertise of nurses that care for patients every single day." Many nurses are experiencing burnout and surveys have found that job dissatisfaction is high among nurses. The industry also is facing critical nursing shortages. A 2023 survey revealed that nearly one-third of nurses (30%) say they are likely to leave their career due to the pandemic, up seven points since 2021, according to AMN Healthcare data published Monday. Healthcare career marketplace Incredible Health surveyed more than 3,000 nurses this year, in March, and found nearly a quarter of nurses say they are very likely to leave their role this year. Though nurses are slightly less dissatisfied with current staffing levels compared to 2023, 88% believe that patient care is being negatively impacted by staffing shortages. Only 11% of nurses have used AI in their roles, according to that survey. Most (70%) don’t see AI impacting their roles in the next year, though 64% believe AI will negatively impact their employment overall. And 65% think the technology will impact the industry negatively overall.  Some do recognize the positive impacts of AI, like supporting technological education and making processes more efficient, Incredible Health found.

MONDAY, July 15, 2024 -- For very low birth-weight (VLBW) infants, transcatheter closure of the patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) is increasingly used, with selected short-term outcomes slightly more favorable, according to a study published online July 15 in Pediatrics . Brianna F. Leahy, M.B.B.S., from the University of Vermont in Burlington, and colleagues describe survival and short-term outcomes among VLBW infants (born from 401 to 1,500 g or 22 to 29 weeks of gestational age) who underwent transcatheter or surgical PDA closure from 2018 to 2022. Data were included for 6,410 of 216,267 infants at 726 hospitals who received invasive PDA treatment. The researchers observed an increase in the use of transcatheter closure, from 29.8 percent in 2018 to 71.7 percent in 2022. Higher survival was seen for VLBW infants undergoing transcatheter closure, and they had a similar length of stay, neonatal complications, and receipt of discharge support. Survival and discharge support were found to be similar in subgroup analyses conducted for infants with birth weight ≥700 g and born in 2020 to 2022, whereas selected neonatal complications and length of stay were reduced after transcatheter closure. "Although selected VLBW short-term outcomes after transcatheter closure, including survival, neonatal complications, and length of stay, may be slightly more favorable compared with surgical closure, this retrospective observational study did not include many important clinical factors, and statistical observations should be interpreted cautiously and in the appropriate neonatal clinical context," the authors write. Abstract/Full Text Editorial Whatever your topic of interest, subscribe to our newsletters to get the best of Drugs.com in your inbox.