Arjun Venkatesh, Kathryn Hawk, Andrew Taylor
Prime Institution: Yale University
Emergency departments (EDs) are key settings in identifying and treating opioid use disorder (OUD). Data-driven evaluation and interventions to improve OUD care in ED settings are lacking, and there is a gap in ED data systems to advance research in this area. This project aims to develop a data system that automates and integrates electronic health record and administrative data from EDs into the Clinical Emergency Department Registry (CEDR), partnering with the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). The investigators will assess the digital readiness and develop and deploy the enhanced ED OUD data infrastructure. This project has a potential to result in improved national ED data registry, automated ED OUD dashboards to guide near-real time local quality improvement initiatives, independent ED OUD registry research dataset, and a public facing, web based near-real time ED OUD care dashboard that can be used for public health surveillance.
Arjun Venkatesh, MD, MBA, MHS
Dr. Venkatesh is a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale University. He is also Scientist at the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. He has been funded by the NIH, AHRQ, and the Emergency Medicine Foundation to study health system outcomes and efficiency, and he is supported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as co- Principal Investigator of the Emergency Quality Network (E-QUAL) and for the development of the Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings. He has received over $6 million in grant funding and published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and is senior editor of The Evidence book series. He is national leader within ACEP and SAEM and he serves on expert panels for the National Quality Forum (NQF), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and CMS. His work is also funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Addiction Policy Forum to advance the quality and delivery of emergency and acute care for opioid use disorder. Dr. Venkatesh earned his undergraduate degree at Northwestern University. He went on to earn an MBA from Ohio State University before completing medical school at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Most recently he completed Emergency Medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program here at Yale University. He is originally from Dayton, OH and resides in New Haven.
Kathryn Hawk, MD, MHS
Dr. Hawk is an attending physician in the Yale New Haven Hospital Emergency Department and an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine, the Yale School of Public Health and the Program in Addiction Medicine. She was a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) K12 sponsored Drug use, Addiction and HIV Research (DAHRS) Scholar, and is board certified in emergency and addiction medicine. She completed her residency training and research fellowship in the Yale University Department of Emergency Medicine. Her research primarily focuses on the design, testing and implementation of evidence based-care for ED patients with substance use disorders, with a focus on initiating medications for the treatment of opioid and alcohol use disorder in the ED and maximizing effective linkage to ongoing treatment using innovative strategies. Her research on quality improvement and reducing opioid-associated mortality through data linkages, overdose prevention and harm reduction strategies, implementation-facilitation ED-initiated buprenorphine for opioid use disorder, initiating treatment for alcohol use disorder in the ED and the dissemination of evidence-based best practices for care of patients with addiction has been funded by NIDA, the NIDA Clinical Trials Network, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Emergency Medicine Foundation (EMF), Foundation for Opioid Response (FORE), and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).
Andrew Taylor, MD, MHS
Dr. Taylor's primary interest is in informatics and improving patient care through data science. His research focuses on applying database, data mining, and machine learning techniques to big data stored in a variety of health care-related sources. In his role as Director of Clinical Informatics and Analytics he oversees numerous IT aspects in the ED including: building dashboards with sophisticated models (risk adjustment etc.), developing ED clinical decision support tools, and serving as the liaison to hospital IT leadership. Dr. Taylor earned his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Mississippi. He completed medical school at Emory University School of Medicine and Emergency Medicine residency at the University of Connecticut. Most recently he completed fellowships in point-of-care ultrasound and Masters in Health Science with an informatics focus from Yale University. He lives in Durham with his wife and four kids.