Pennsylvania Ag Connection - Penn-CHOP Named CDC Prevention Epicenter Site

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Penn-CHOP Named CDC Prevention Epicenter Site
Pennsylvania Ag Connection - 06/29/2016

The Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have been awarded over $5 million to serve as a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Prevention Epicenter site to help develop and test innovative approaches to preventing superbugs and improving patient safety.

The Penn-CHOP site is one of five academic medical centers to receive the designation as part of the CDC's patient safety research effort known as the Prevention Epicenters Program, which was created in 1997 to address the emerging problem of health care-associated infections. This round of funding (a total of $26 million) more than doubles previous awards and extends the program to 2020.

Ebbing Lautenbach, MD, MPH, MSCE, chief of the division of Infectious Diseases and senior scholar in Penn's Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CCEB), and Jeff Gerber, MD, PhD, an attending physician at CHOP and CCEB senior scholar, will serve as co-principal investigators for the Penn-CHOP site.

Penn has been a designated site since 2011, when the CDC awarded $2 million to its CCEB. This latest award brings pediatric research and care into the fold.

"Penn is proud to continue to serve as an Epicenter Program site and be part of a larger, collaborative effort with our neighbor CHOP to advance the science on health care-associated infections and help discover new approaches and solutions that will ultimately improve patient care," Lautenbach said.

The Penn-CHOP site represents a broad collaboration across the two institutions with a dual focus on adult and pediatric patient populations. The investigators bring expertise in fields ranging from infectious diseases, geriatrics, critical care, pulmonary medicine, emergency medicine, epidemiology, biostatistics, bioinformatics, health economics, and microbiology.

Numerous clinical and research resources will help to support the mission of the Penn-CHOP Epicenter site, including the CCEB, the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics, the Institute on Aging, the Center for Public Health Initiatives, the Penn/CHOP Microbiome Program, the CHOP Research Institute, and the CHOP Center for Pediatric Clinical Effectiveness.

The site will investigate risk factors and characterize outcomes for healthcare-associated viral infections in hospitalized children and adults, use of biomarkers to inform antimicrobial prescribing, antimicrobial stewardship in health care and community settings, and study multidrug-resistance organisms in long-term acute care settings, among other areas.

Funding for the Prevention Epicenters is part of CDC's Antibiotic Resistance Solutions Initiative, an national effort transforming the Agency's ability to further address antibiotic resistance at all levels. Prevention Epicenter efforts will help slow the development of resistant bacteria and prevent the spread of resistant infections, the first goal in the National Strategy for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.

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