Thesis Opportunity in Congenital Heart Defect Surveillance
Category : APE/ILE Student Opportunities
Project Description
“The Surveillance of Congenital Heart Defects in Children, Adolescents and Adults” project, is seeking MPH students for data analysis projects that can be used for student theses.
We’re currently in a 3rd round Cooperative Agreement funding from CDC (8th year), and we have a multi-disciplinary team which includes faculty and staff from Epi and HPM in RSPH, cardiology from the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing. We’ve built strong partnerships in and around Atlanta and across the state with folks from GA Dept of Public Health, Grady, Piedmont, Northside, CHOA/Sibley Heart, the MACDP (Metro-Atlanta Congenital Defects Program) birth defects registry folks at CDC etc., and we have an active CHD community advisory committee (CAC) in place comprised of not only academics, practitioners, and advocacy groups, but also patients and parents.
Specifically, we conduct state-wide surveillance of individuals with congenital heart defects (CHDs) across the lifespan with the following project aims in mind:
- to improve understanding of age-specific mortality, healthcare utilization, comorbidities, survival and other outcomes over time;
- to improve understanding of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic patterns in healthcare usage, and their impact on long-term outcomes over time;
- to gain a greater understanding of the strengths and limitations of databases used for CHDs surveillance; and
- to increase CHDs awareness among the public and stakeholders.
In conducting this work, we hope to assist individuals with CHD and their families in their expectations and healthcare decisions, improve decision-making among stakeholders, and ultimately lead to more effective secondary prevention strategies to reduce the public health impact of CHDs.
We have lots of data ready to analyze including 15 years of Medicaid claims, and 6+ years of linked data from clinical and administrative sources including data linked from GA vital birth and death records.
Contact Information
All interested students should contact Cheryl Raskind-Hood (co-PI of the project) to discuss the opportunity further by emailing her at craskin [at] emory [dot] edu.
