Dear Community,
Please join us for our Spring Virtual ACTION Meeting in April! Registration is open for this 2-day Zoom meeting taking place on April 5 & 6, 2021, from 2–5pm ET / 11am–2pm PT on both dates. We're taking a different approach for this meeting, and really want to focus on the collaborative nature of ACTION. This meeting will be based entirely on input from ACTION centers, featuring individual centers’ challenges (pitfalls) and successes (pearls). Because of the nature of this meeting, it is an especially good time to invite a broad range of providers at your site—everyone is welcome!
We had 32 ACTION centers return their responses to the Pearls & Pitfalls worksheet! Presentation topics have been selected for teams, and team slides are due to Lauren Smyth by March 30. Thank you for your continued efforts and willingness to share and learn across our network.
Stay safe and healthy,
Impella® use in pediatrics
April 8, 2021
4–5 PM Eastern
Moderator
Asma Razavi, MD
Texas Children's Hospital
Featured Presentations
DISEASE AND DEVICE MATCHING
Lana Shugh, MD
Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital
DEVICE TO PATIENT MATCH – IMPLANTATION STRATEGIES
Brian Morray, MD
Seattle Children’s Hospital
DEVICE AND PATIENT MANAGEMENT
Sebastian Tume, MD
Texas Children’s Hospital
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Please submit any questions that you would like for our presenters to discuss on the registration page.
Please register by April 7, 2021. Registration is free and open to anyone interested in participating. To join us, click below:
Upcoming Events
April 5 & 6, 2021, 2–5pm ET (both days)
ACTION Spring 2021 Meeting — (VIRTUAL)
Register Now
Check it out!
ACTION @ ISHLT: Look Who’s Talking
April 24th 1:25pm | Jenna Murray: "The ABC's Of Stroke Prevention: Reduction In Stroke Frequency Following A Quality Improvement Intervention By The Action Learning Network, Jenna Murray et al."
- April 24th at 2:15pm | Kurt Schumacher: ACTION Talks
- April 25th at 10:25am | John Dykes: "Atrial Cannulation in Pediatric Mechanical Circulatory Support, John Dykes et al."
- April 26th at 6:35am | Muhammad Shezad: "The Adjudication Process at ACTION - Providing Real-World High-Quality Data, Muhammad Shezad et al."
- April 26th at 6:40am | Deipanjan Nandi: "Ventricular Assist Device Outcomes In Children And Young Adults With Muscular Dystrophy: An ACTION Analysis, Deipanjan Nandi et al."
- April 27th at 10:05am | Anna Joong: "Outcomes of Infants and Children with Stage 1 Single Ventricle Implanted with Ventricular Assist Devices: An Analysis of the Advanced Cardiac Therapies Improving Outcomes Network (ACTION) Registry, Anna Joong et al."
- April 27th at 10:35am | David Peng: "Characterization of Strokes in Children on Ventricular Assist Devices: An Action Collaborative Analysis, Dave Peng et al."
- April 28th at 10:35am | Danielle Burstein: "Length Of Stay And Readmission Rates In Pediatric Acute Heart Failure, Danielle Burstein et al."
- April 30th at 11:00pm | David Rosenthal: "The ACTION Quality Improvement Collaborative: 2020 Annual Report, David Rosenthal et al."
HVAD™ System eBook
Now Available!
The electronic HVAD™ System Patient Education Handbook is now available! We are also printing hard copies, and will be shipping them out soon to ACTION sites. Thank you to all of the collaborative ACTION members that made this resource possible!
VAD “Go-Bags” Now Available!
We are excited to announce our collaboration with The Georgia Claire Bowen Foundation, in partnership with Petit Peony's Peach Project, to develop a My ACTION “go bag” for VAD patients to carry their backup equipment. Families, providers, nurses and patients have always struggled with finding the perfect “go bag” to hold their extra VAD equipment and we worked together to create a solution! ACTION provided an emergency card and a “go bag” checklist, and Petit Peony manufactured the bags. ACTION sites that responded to our survey will be receiving the bags soon!
*The bag is not approved to hold active life-saving equipment. It should act as a “go bag” holding back-up equipment and everything else a patient may need.
Quality Improvement Updates
Discharge Project
The next Discharge Committee meeting will take place on April 7, 2021. We will share data analysis, updates and discussion points from our Discharge leadership meetings. Please continue to test the Flight Plan and Journey Map, and enter data into REDCap on any patients who have been discharged or transferred to the floor.
Stroke Project
We believe that we can drive down strokes even further and are working on re-launching ABCs 2.0 soon. During ACTION’s fall meeting there was encouraging discussion around how we can use real time data and an M&M-type of sharing forum to learn from past strokes to make improvements. Stay tuned for more details coming in the next few months! Additionally, the REDCap fields have been revamped to make it easier and faster to enter data. Please continue to enter data into REDCap for your VAD patients for the first 8 weeks of implant.
Telehealth Project
Teams & telehealth leadership have recently agreed to shift the project focus. The peak of telehealth visits/telehealth utilization seemed to spike during the first couple months of COVID, and rates of use have fallen since then. Telehealth is still a valuable tool we would like to continue to use and test in ACTION. Our next focus will be on using telehealth to optimize and uptitrate medicines for heart failure patients. More details to come as we begin designing this next phase of the project!
Heart Failure Project
We excitedly launched the Heart Failure Improvement Project on January 26th with 22 sites! Teams are testing 2 interventions: a communication checklist and a discharge plan. We are aiming to reduce length of stay for heart failure patients admitted to the hospital, as well as decrease readmissions. Data is being collected for frequency of checklist use and discharge plan creation, and we just started our first analysis of this project data!
Registry Database
Updates
ACTION QI ID
The ACTION DCC has rolled out a new “ACTION QI ID” process for REDCap projects. Sites and data entry personnel no longer need to remember a patient’s ACTION ID for the QI projects. Starting with the Heart Failure QI project, and rolling out with new REDCap QI projects in the future, sites will enter just 3 data fields each time they enter data for a QI project. The ACTION QI ID will auto-populate, and will be de-identified with the auto-population. This new process will allow us to better track patients across projects, as well as ease the burden of tracking unique ID’s at the site level.
*For VAD patients and data entry into the Simplified Clinical VAD Registry, please continue to use your current process of assigning the ACTION Registry ID.
Please email action.dcc@cchmc.org with any questions.
