The winning oral abstracts are selected concurrently with the Conference in a peer-review process. The best of the abstracts will be described by the lead presenter of each. This session has historically been lively and highly rated by attendees.
Learning Objectives
- Describe cutting-edge research and innovative practice improvement and educational strategies for improving diagnosis in medicine;
- Learn about diagnostic errors and their potential causes in a series of case vignettes.
Oral Abstract Titles and Presenting Authors
- Using Medical Record Reviews to Verify Patient-Reported Diagnostic Concerns: What are We Missing? – Traber Giardina, Assistant Professor, Baylor College of Medicine and Houston VA
- Communication of Diagnostic Uncertainty Across Teams and With Families at Admission – Ursula Nawab, Senior Medical Director of Patient Safety, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
- Bayesian Network Analysis Identifies Patterns of Diagnostic Delay in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis – Mei-Sing Ong, Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School & Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
- Implementation, Validation, and Mortality Association of 2 Cancer Diagnosis Digital Quality Measures – Andrew Zimolzak, Assistant Professor, Baylor College of Medicine
- A Code that Means “Undiagnosed” to Shorten the Rare Disease Diagnostic Odyssey – Helen Hernandez, Scientist and Founder, KAL Research Initiatives
- Impact of Automated Patient Outcome Feedback on Emergency Medicine Resident Patient Follow-up – Robert El-Kareh, Associate Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Diego Health
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Traber Giardina, PhD
Assistant ProfessorBaylor College of Medicine and Houston VA
Houston, TXDr. Giardina is a patient safety researcher and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine and the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center. Dr. Giardina’s work focus on patients’ experiences of diagnostic error and exploring methods to leverage health IT to improve patient engagement in safety.
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Ursula Nawab, MD
Senior Medical Director of Patient SafetyChildren’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Philadelphia, PA - x
Mei-Sing Ong, PhD
Assistant ProfessorHarvard Medical School & Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
Boston, MAMei-Sing Ong, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Medical School & Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. As a scientist working at the intersection of informatics and medicine, Dr. Ong’s research harnesses longitudinal clinical data to improve diagnosis and optimal treatment of chronic diseases, with a focus on advancing evidence-based care for pediatric chronic diseases. Her research introduces computational methodologies to the study of chronic diseases that are often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed, including the application of machine learning methods to identify underdiagnosed diseases and to investigate patterns of diagnostic failures. Dr. Ong was a NAM scholar in diagnostic excellence in 2021.
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Andrew Zimolzak, MD, MMSc
Assistant ProfessorBaylor College of Medicine
Houston, TXAndrew Zimolzak is an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, department of medicine, section of health services research; and the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety (IQuESt). Dr. Zimolzak has studied the secondary use of routinely collected medical data for 10 years. He has direct experience with the retrieval and analysis of data from electronic medical records from multiple health care systems, as well as medical insurance claims. This work has been applied to physicians’ delayed follow-up of patient test results, diagnostic errors in the emergency department, randomized trials of medications for hypertension and heart failure, pharmacogenomics, lung cancer genomic precision medicine, kidney failure prediction, and outcome prediction in COVID-19. Dr. Zimolzak has practiced general internal medicine in urgent care and inpatient hospital settings for over ten years. In addition to research efforts, he is a teaching hospitalist at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston. His interests include deriving accurate phenotype information from medical records, machine learning for improved efficiency of data cleaning, and research code reproducibility and sharing. He has been funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
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Helen Hernandez
Scientist and FounderKAL Research Initiatives
Katy, TX - x
Robert El-Kareh, MD, MPH, MS
Associate Professor of MedicineUniversity of California, San Diego Health
San Diego, CARobert El-Kareh, MD, MPH, MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine within the Division of Biomedical Informatics at the University of California, San Diego. He also serves as Associate Chief Medical Officer for Transformation and Learning and leads the Clinical Decision Support Oversight Committee at UC San Diego Health. Clinically, he is a practicing hospital medicine physician and is board-certified in Clinical Informatics.
Dr. El-Kareh's primary academic activities involve the use of clinical data to improve diagnostic safety in healthcare. Dr. El-Kareh has active research and performance improvement projects related to detection and evaluation of inpatient diagnostic delays, systematic feedback of patient outcomes to frontline providers and tools to guide the appropriate use of diagnostic tests.
