Transformational Pediatrics

Ana Cohen, PhD, discusses Children's Mercy's cutting edge genetic testing, and how they're improving access by expanding research to rural communities.

The Piccolo device is an innovative and minimally invasive way to close the Patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) in pediatrics. Dr. Rockefeller talks about how the Piccolo came to fruition, the benefits, and what else is on the horizon for the PDA closure world.

Children’s Mercy Kansas City, one of the nation’s leading independent pediatric health organizations, announced it is the first health care system to use 5-base HiFi sequencing, the world’s most-advanced genomic sequencing technology from PacBio, in the clinical setting to accelerate diagnoses for even more patients and families.

Incredible advances in the care of patients born with single-ventricle heart disease have led to significantly better quality of life and survival. Complex surgical palliation culminating in the Fontan procedure is effective and can allow patients to grow and develop similar to their peers. Unfortunately, changes related to Fontan anatomy lead to stress and increased pressure on the liver, known as Fontan-associated liver disease. These stresses can cause scar tissue to form and—rarely—liver cancer to form. Dedicated liver care is vital to providing Fontan patients with the healthiest life possible.

Data science -- often discussed with terms like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, data goverernance -- has the potential to transform every aspect of health care, from the patient experience to how, when and where care is provided, and improving outcomes. In this Transformational Pediatrics episode, Mark Hoffman, PhD, Chief Research Information Officer at Children's Mercy Kansas City, discusses the challenges and opportunities for data science within pediatric health care and gives examples where it is already making a difference for children today.

Nearly 1 in 5 children in the United States live in rural areas. Rural children experience health and health care disparities compared to their urban peers and represent a unique and vulnerable pediatric patient population. Important disparities exist in all-cause mortality, suicide, firearm-related unintentional injury, and obesity. In this episode, Dr. Jessica Bettenhausen discusses research into these disparities, their causes and potential actions to address them.

The Children’s Mercy Research Institute® is undertaking a research initiative to build a first-of-its-kind pediatric data repository to facilitate the search for answers and novel treatments for pediatric genetic conditions. Our goal is to collect genomic data and health information for 30,000 children and their families over the next seven years, creating a database of nearly 100,000 genomes.