Pilot Award Winners
Innovation Well-Being Pilot Award Winners
In 2019, The Center for Health Innovation collaborated with the UNC System-Wide Integrated Well-Being Program to offer funding for pilots that promote the well-being of faculty and staff within the UNC Health Care System with the goal of meeting the fourth arm of the Quadruple Aim: preventing burnout and improving work-life balance.
2019
The use of electronic health records (EHR) directly contributes to physician burnout. Additionally, poor EHR design can affect decision making and cause delays in care, medical errors, and unanticipated patient-safety events. By providing individual, tailored training for physicians struggling with EHR usability, this project aims to improve EHR experience and mitigate EHR-related stressors, decreasing EHR burden and improving physician well-being.
Innovation Pilot Award Winners
Since 2013, the Center has offered an annual internal pilot funding opportunity to UNC Health Care and UNC School of Medicine employees for health care innovations across a broad spectrum of interest areas including innovative care delivery models and care pathways, new technologies, new applications, advanced analytics, business model innovations, workforce development, and translational research. Since introducing the Innovation Pilot Awards in 2013, the Center has awarded 26 teams over $1,180,000 total to support innovative pilots.
2019
Vestibulodynia (VBD) is a very common cause of sexual pain of reproductive aged women in the United States. One of the first-line treatments for VBD, topical lidocaine 5% ointment, cream or gel, is difficult to apply due to the content and lack of a directed delivery system. Innovative vestibule medication delivery systems are needed to permit longer, directed therapy. This project will be the first to apply a specialized thin film technology to the vulvar vestibule.
The aims of this project are to obtain IND approval and develop assays to support Phase 1/2 clinical trials for a gene therapy treatment for Mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS) IIIA. MPS IIIA is a devastating genetic disease with profound neurological disorders leading to early death and no effective treatment exists. The added value of successful gene therapy approaches to this disease will be extremely meaningful for affected families. The assays developed by this project are essential for subject recruitment, safety and outcome assessment of MPS IIIA gene therapy clinical trials.
This project proposes to develop and implement a standardized Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) elective for residents in Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics. Success of this project will pave the way for further widespread, interdepartmental and interdisciplinary efforts throughout UNC Health Care and a more robust curriculum for the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a common, costly chronic disease that can cause significant suffering. Those with IBD are up to twice as likely to suffer from anxiety and depression. Likewise, IBD patients with coexisting mental illness experience more severe illness and incur higher health care costs. This project aims to implement the Collaborative Care Model (CoCM) within the UNC Multidisciplinary Center for IBD to better integrate medical and behavioral/psychological care for these patients. This is the first time that CoCM is being applied to the IBD population. If successful, it could serve as a model for and developing the capabilities necessary to spread CoCM to other specialty practices.
Hypertension is the most modifiable risk factor associated with deaths from cardiovascular disease. This project is designed to introduce a new, patient-centered model of care for hypertension management, including more accurate blood pressure readings at the point of care as well as leveraging new technologies for home-based monitoring.
2018
This team aims to be the first to apply drug-eluting technology to a string release system and the first to apply it to the esophagus. The incidence and prevalence of eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) are rapidly rising and current treatments are rudimentary. Drug-eluting string technology is an innovative approach to delivering medication along the entire length of the esophagus for an extended period of time. The pilot award will be used to develop the technology and test its pharmacokinetics in a porcine model.
The focus of this project is to empower postpartum women affected by hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) to perform at-home blood pressure (BP) monitoring with the aid of digital technology. For a postpartum woman with a diagnosis of a HPD, the risk of complications extends beyond discharge from maternity care. Clinical guidelines recommend early postpartum follow-up in the form of a BP evaluation by a health care provider at 7-10 days postpartum. However, due to numerous barriers faced by new mothers, attendance at follow-up visits is poor and reflects significant disparities. This pilot project aims to measure adherence to the postpartum BP assessment among women who are provided with an at-home BP monitoring device and the feasibility of the use of such a device among a diverse population.
The goal of this project is to establish a novel, cost-effective, patient-centered financial navigation clinic in order to decrease the burden of financial difficulties among uninsured and underinsured cancer patients treated at the North Carolina Cancer Hospital. The team will use historical clinical and financial data to identify patient populations with the greatest financial burden in order to recruit them for this pilot intervention. The team will develop a financial distress screening strategy and design, implement, and evaluate a financial navigation clinic for patients in the targeted populations who screen positive for high levels of financial distress. The team will also collaborate with the UNC School of Social Work to staff the clinic with social work masters students.
The overarching aim of this study is to stage peripheral arterial disease (PAD) similar to the tumor staging criteria used to communicate with oncology patients. The spectrum of patients presenting with PAD is broad and treatment options are numerous. The team hopes that PAD staging will help inform patients of their survival and limb salvage probabilities based on their presenting characteristics. The team will initially focus on patients with critical limb ischemia by determining which covariates are associated with outcome status and then developing and evaluating a predictive model using machine learning that classifies subjects by outcome status.
2017
Development of Augmented Reality Applications to Improve Safety and Efficiency in the Operating Room
Leveraging the rapidly developing technology known as augmented reality, this team will develop an augmented reality system for use in both open and endoscopic surgery. Augmented reality is defined as a live direct or indirect view of a physical environment whose elements are augmented by the fusion of computer-generated and real-time images. This augmented reality environment for the operating room would allow for localization of a patient’s specific pathology and normal anatomic landmarks. The ability to super-impose the exact location and dimensions of an underlying tumor, for example, on a surgeon’s direct view of the patient promises to positively impact both efficiency and patient safety in the operating room.
This team will develop and implement Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) services at UNC to power a model that predicts the likelihood a patient will attend an appointment and a companion app that uses that model to optimize how patients are scheduled for gastrointestinal procedures (e.g., colonoscopies and upper endoscopies). UNC will gain infrastructure and experience with a single open-standards-based pipeline for data integration, standardization, and access to solve focused research and clinical problems. No-shows to gastroenterology procedure appointments are especially costly given the high demand for these appointments and significant fixed resources required to deliver these services. The app will combine patient-reported and clinical data to optimize how patients are scheduled and prepared for these procedures.
Building on the back of UNC Infectious Disease’s Outpatient Parenteral Antimicrobial Therapy (OPAT) Program, ID DOOR will positively disrupt the workflow surrounding hospital discharge for Infectious Disease patients at high risk of adverse outcomes, suboptimal completion of a therapeutic plan, and readmission. ID DOOR will expand access to clinical pharmacist outpatient services post-discharge to ensure medication safety, fidelity to discharge planning and to address any medication side effects. The pharmacist will work closely with UNC’s transition of care team as well as OPAT providers and the program is expected to improve safety, clinical efficiency, patient access, patient satisfaction, and clinical outcomes.
2016
The Carolina Digital Health Research Initiative (CaDHRI) will provide a catalyst for disruptive innovation in digital health research at UNC. The CaDHRI will support digital health researchers through consultations, digital device lending, and events. The program will create a comprehensive digital health device collection housed at the Health Sciences Library. This device collection will be available for researchers to test the devices and applications, as well as, incorporate the devices into their research. In addition to the device collection, the CaDHRI will also host a series of digital health workshops, seminars, and speakers.
The team will build upon the success of the recently launched PPD ACT iPhone app which was developed to engage women in a genetics research study about postpartum depression (PPD). The study, which enrolled over 10,000 women in the first month, aims to help researchers understand why some women suffer from PPD and others do not – critical knowledge to help researchers find more effective treatments. Specifically, the team will enhance the functionality of the pre-existing app by adding innovative, clinically relevant enhancements including the ability to track and display self-reported symptoms and physiological data captured via wearable devices. The app will be able to deliver education about PPD, send participants feedback based on trends in daily assessments, and allow users to participate in a PPD online-community. The team will conduct pilot testing of the app in women with PPD at UNC, and data collected and displayed via the app will be used in the evaluation and delivery of personalized treatment for these patients.
UNC Cardiology will partner with a well-established primary care office to improve the detection and treatment of aortic valve disease in the community and the surrounding area. In order to accomplish this goal, PCP’s will be trained and empowered to use hand-held ultrasound units to perform bedside cardiac ultrasound screenings for aortic valve disease and will partner with UNC Cardiology in Chapel Hill to confirm the diagnosis, complete the evaluation, and establish a treatment plan.
The primary objective of this study is to demonstrate superiority of the computerized cognitive behavioral therapy program “Beating the Blues” in reducing psychological symptoms and improving patient satisfaction in women who have completed active treatment for non-metastatic breast cancer.
2015
The Emergency Department currently employs a 5-point Emergency Severity Index (ESI) scale to triage patients; however, the rating tool groups over half of the UNC patients into the “3 – urgent” category without further specificity. Using innovative advanced analytics, this project seeks to expand and enhance the existing scale by identifying the predictors of complexity of acuity among patients currently grouped in the ESI 3 category and develop novel operational strategies using the new classification.
Although it is common for AF patients who present at the ED to be hospitalized, management of AF symptoms rarely requires inpatient resources. This project aims to reduce unnecessary hospitalization by implementing and evaluating a new protocol-based care pathway for AF patients who present at the ED, directing those without complications to an AF Transitions Clinic staffed by clinical pharmacists and overseen by Cardiology and Electrophysiology. The Transitions Clinic will provide patient education, and multidisciplinary care coordination of AF and comorbidities. The clinic will also ensure communication with the patients’ primary care provider and schedule follow-up appointments.
2014
To evaluate the efficacy of existing hypertrophic burn treatment options in a prospective, randomized, controlled, single-blinded trial, compared to medical therapy alone, and determine the feasibility of a SMART (Sequential, Multiple Assignment, Randomized Trial) design in burn patients.
To optimize speech outcomes with cochlear implants by measuring and monitoring cochlear function during implantation.
To build and validate a new low-cost prototype ultrasound system designed specifically for penile and scrotal imaging that will expand the existing advantages of ultrasound and is more easily deployed to, and used at, a wide range of clinics and hospitals.
To develop and measure the impact of a peer support program to provide evidence-based, compassionate and timely peer support to UNC caregivers involved in adverse patient events.
2013
To develop a proto-type of a patient portal that is easily comprehended and organized in a way that is meaningful to patients.
To create an infrastructure to objectively assess workload and performance for providers performing routine clinical tasks that require human-computer interactions.
To develop and test an EHR-based CHD prevention program to promote CHD risk calculation, appropriate prescribing and patient adherence to prescribed medications
An innovative approach to training certified medical assistants in the team-based concepts behind patient centered medical homes.