New Awards for Pulmonary Faculty
The Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Occupational Pulmonary Medicine congratulates Drs. Elizabeth Middleton and Nathan Dean on a new K08 award and R-18 award, respectively.
Dr. Middleton’s K08 focuses on studying changes in megakaryocyte and in turn platelet gene expression in sepsis. Her gene of interest if a low affinity IgG receptor, FcyRIIA, that has functions in immunity and thrombosis. She will study cells from patients hospitalized at the University of Utah MICU and animal models of sepsis to explore the regulation, expression and function of FcyRIIA induced by sepsis.
Dr. Dean’s R-18 is from the Agency for Health Research and Quality. This is a 3-year project funded at $1.35 million dollars. Dr. Dean will adapt for urgent care clinics a validated, real-time, emergency department deployed, electronic pneumonia clinical decision support tool (ePNa) that incorporates the five rights of CDS. ePNa will incorporate real-time, artificial intelligence identification of pneumonia findings in chest Xray images. Using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, he will then deploy ePNa into one of 2 randomly assigned clusters of Utah urgent care clinics each with ~800 pneumonia patients annually, and determine whether accuracy of diagnosis improves and fewer patients are transferred to an emergency department for further evaluation.