9:30 – 10:00am
Registration
Network over refreshments
10:00 – 10:30am
Welcome
Pinar Keskinocak, Julia Kubanek
10:30 – 11:30am
Rapid Fire Research / Project Presentations (GT Researchers)
Closing Racial Equity Gaps by Improving the Health of Urban Neighborhoods
David Edwards
I am leading an effort by the City of Atlanta to close racial equity gaps in Atlanta through transformational improvements in the health of our most distressed neighborhoods. These are neighborhoods where childhood exposure to sources of toxic stress impedes healthy physiological and neurological al development. Sources of toxic stress come in many forms, but prominent among them are the environmental conditions in neighborhoods where children are conceived, born and raised. Environmental hazards such as exposure to lead or air-borne contaminants, noise that disrupts normal sleep patterns, relatively high ambient air temperatures, a lack of accessible green space, crime and violence, housing instability, limited access to healthy food options, and the lack of strong and stable social networks are all sources of toxic stress. I will be discussing the research and science that is informing our neighborhood transformation strategies and the efforts we have underway to harness local academic resources in support of this work.
Birds Tell Us What is Happening in the Environment
Ben Freeman
My lab studies how montane birds are responding to climate change and land use change. In this presentation, I will argue that birds are exceptionally well-positioned to tell us about what is happening in the environment (i.e. environmental health). This is because birds are sensitive indicators of environmental changes (“the canary in the coal mine”) and because we have extraordinary amounts of data on where birds live thanks to citizen science programs such as eBird. As a consequence, we are able to measure – in near real-time – how birds dynamically respond to environmental changes.
Designing Health Systems with an Asset-Based Approach
Jennifer Kim
Healthcare systems often adopt deficit-based models, which concentrate on identifying and resolving the problems faced by care receivers from the perspective of care providers. While these deficit models are essential for assessing needs and priorities, they can inadvertently lead to care receivers internalizing their perceived dependencies and a reduced sense of agency in making changes in their lives. The issue becomes even more pronounced when applied to technology designs, particularly concerning neurodiverse individuals like those with autism or intellectual disabilities. These technologies tend to view neurodivergent individuals as having a “disorder” that needs to be “fixed,” resulting in solutions that focus on assumed deficiencies within the individual due to their exclusion from the design process. In this presentation, I will discuss how technology can adopt an asset-based approach to design, prioritizing the capacities, interests, and preferences of neurodivergent individuals, with the goal of promoting their health and well-being.
Health Data Opportunities at Georgia Tech: Spotlighting Health Care Datasets Available to GT Researcher and Collaborators
Richard Starr
We will discuss health care datasets available for researchers at Georgia Tech and collaborators including:
- CMS Medicaid Data (2005-2020): A dataset of US Medicaid claims records which include Inpatient, Outpatient, and Prescription Claims, with associated cost information.
- OHSU I-CONECT Dataset: A series of weekly video and audio interviews between older adults and trained conversational agents.
- Shriner’s Hospital Data Resources: Consists of Electronic Medical Records from 20 hospitals, also containing video, imaging, and genetic data.
- Cognitive Empowerment Program Dataset: IoT device data from homes of individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment and their care partners.
Each of these datasets have unique access and privacy criteria but are accessible for research in line with approved protocols.
Towards the Three “Rights” and Three “E”s: Industrial Engineering to Improve Healthcare Delivery
Lauren Steimle
I will discuss my research involving the creation of industrial engineering methods to answer decision-making problems arising in public health and medicine. Many of these decision-making problems focus the three “rights” – that is, how do we get the right care to the right people at the right time? Often, these problems are further complicated by limited resources which means there are often trade-offs between the three “E”s: effectiveness (the best outcomes), efficiency (the lowest cost), and equity (the most equitable). I will discuss how we use industrial engineering to tackle such problems drawing on examples from three streams of my research: infectious disease prevention/control, design of regionalized systems of healthcare delivery, and medical decision making.
You can view the recorded version of this presentation here.
Improving Societal Outcomes in Organ Recovery and Transplantation
Ravi Subramanian
The literature on organ recovery and transplantation underscores the importance of coordinated actions by the supply-side entities in an organ donation value chain (ODVC) in the form of relevant efforts, timely referrals, and timely organ recovery. We take the perspective of the social planner and analyze the operational decisions of two key supply-side entities in a cadaver ODVC within a donor service area — namely, the organ procurement organization (OPO) and the main trauma center hospital within the donor service area.
We develop an analytical model to study the effects of: (i) contextual factors, including reimbursement rates for the hospital, shared OR capacity between organ recovery and other procedures, donor heterogeneity, and increments in quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) for organ recipients and the hospital’s other patients; and, (ii) the decisions of the OPO and the hospital; on their respective payoffs and on societal outcomes. Our analysis identifies misalignments in the objectives of the social planner, the OPO, and the hospital, and recommends contracts that can be broadly beneficial.
Prioritizing Green and Grey Infrastructure in Communities to Increase Flood Resilience and Support Population Health
Iris Tien
Communities face a number of choices when investing in infrastructure to increase resilience. This talk will focus on green and grey stormwater infrastructure to decrease flood risk and provide potential compound benefits to communities. I will discuss a new method to prioritize green and grey infrastructure – including selection of solutions and recommendations for placement locations – in communities to increase flood resilience and support population health. Compared to prior work, it considers both green and grey infrastructure and enables detailed spatial analysis of a community. Multiple factors are included in the approach, including the myriad benefits of different infrastructure solutions and local community characteristics. We have applied it to the coastal county of Chatham County, GA, USA, in collaboration with community partners. Results show how the methodology is used to select green or grey infrastructure solutions and highlight locations that should be prioritized for infrastructure investment. Analyses accounting for uncertainties in future climate projections and population estimates are also conducted. The method results in clear placement locations, and with decision-maker input, enables solutions to be adapted as stakeholder priorities evolve to increase community resilience.
11:30 – 11:35am
Overview of Working Lunch – Strategic Planning Activities
Martha Greenway, Margaret Brackett
11:35 – 11:50am
Poster Session / Networking
11:50 – 1:15pm
Working Lunch
Martha Greenway, Margaret Brackett
Report out from group discussions
1:15 – 1:30pm
Poster Session / Networking
Refreshments
1:30 – 2:30pm
Rapid Fire Research / Project Presentations (GT Researchers)
Designing to Support Health and Wellbeing
Jennifer DuBose
The SimTigrate Design Lab is a research center in the College of Design focused on improving health and wellbeing by elevating the voices of underrepresented stakeholders in the research and design process to understand problems and codesign better solutions. Our team explores the full ecology of designed systems that impact human health and wellbeing, including the built environment, services, devices and policy in partnership with vulnerable populations. Through multiple projects we have investigated the environmental contributors to sleep disruption for hospital patients and older adults living with mild cognitive impairment. Poor sleep habits can lead to significant negative health outcomes, both short term and long term. We are particularly interested in understanding the ways that older minority populations living in low-income neighborhoods are impacted by their neighborhood and residential circumstances. The goal of this research is to develop a suite of educational materials for effective and affordable strategies that seniors can implement on their own, as well as providing guidance to developers and operators of affordable senior housing to improve their environments.
The Georgia APCD: A New Resource for Understanding Healthcare and Equity in Georgia
Jon Duke
In 2020, Georgia established an All Payer Claims Database, a comprehensive dataset of privacy-preserving health information covering a large proportion of the Georgia population. The APCD currently houses claims information on over 7.5M individuals and is designed to facilitate healthcare cost transparency, access, and population health. Dr. Duke will describe the structure of the APCD, its objectives, current priority areas, and mechanism to utilize these data for research.
Leveraging Operations Research and Machine Learning for Robust, Interpretable, and Equitable Models in Healthcare
Gian-Gabriel Garcia
The increasing volume and granularity of health data has created the opportunity to revolutionize nearly every aspect of healthcare. However, to harness the potential in these data, emerging prediction and decision technologies must address fundamental challenges in data-driven modeling, including: how these data were generated, what information they do (and do not) contain, how biases and uncertainty can propagate in data-driven systems, and how to synthesize multiple disjoint data sources. Further, these frameworks must be robust, interpretable, and equitable to ensure that such data-driven frameworks are acceptable and implementable for key stakeholders (e.g., clinicians, patients). In this brief presentation, I will provide a broad overview on how my current research leverages operations research to address these challenges in several disease areas, including concussion management, chronic disease management, opioid-related overdose, and maternal health.
Evolution of Hereditary Disease Risks and the Portability of Genetic Predictions to African Populations
Joe Lachance
In this talk I will summarize work being done in my lab at Georgia Tech. This research involves inferring how genetic disease risks have evolved over recent human history and globalizing genetic predictions of health and disease. One emerging paradigm from this work is that complex diseases appear to be governed more by neutral evolution than by natural selection. Our research has also explored why genetic predictions of disease risk generalize poorly across populations, with one key cause being ascertainment bias (most of what is known about disease genetics comes from studies of European populations). Working with colleagues in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, I have spearheaded efforts to identify why men of African descent are more likely to have aggressive prostate cancer. By conducting the first pan-African genome wide association study of prostate cancer, we have identified novel disease associations and discovered substantial heterogeneity in the genetic risks of this disease across continental and regional scales. Collectively, our findings underscore the limited transferability of genetic predictions across different ancestries and emphasize the importance of conducting studies encompassing a wide range of populations.
Human-Technology Frontier in Sepsis Care
Zahra Mobini
In this presentation, I will provide an overview of my recent research on the human-technology frontier in clinical settings, with a specific emphasis on sepsis—a prevalent, deadly, and costly condition. My research aims to improve care quality by leveraging the capabilities of technology solutions while also accounting for the behavior of caregivers who interact with these tools. Partnering with a large hospital system in the Midwest, we have designed an alert system for early detection of sepsis. This system personalizes alerts for each patient and also factors in caregivers’ compliance behavior in following care standards embedded in the alerts’ workflow. Moreover, my research delves into the interplay within clinical teams, involving nurses and physicians, as they incorporate this alert system into their daily routines. Among the questions we address are the effects of such technological introductions on team synergy and, consequently, caregivers’ overall performance and the quality of care they deliver. By considering these key determinants and intricacies of an effective alert system, from both sides of the human-technology frontier, my research takes a step toward improving sepsis care quality and ultimately saving lives.
The Economics of Reproductive Healthcare Access
Mayra Pineda-Torres
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court made a decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. With this decision, abortion access is regulated by each state, and the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Existing studies have documented the health and economic consequences of detrimental abortion access induced by restrictive abortion policies. I will present evidence of the causal impacts of some of these policies as a preview of what impacts we can expect from the Dobbs decision. Then, I will provide new evidence on the impacts of this Supreme Court decision on fertility.
Design and Construction for Cognitive Aging in Place
Eunhwa Yang
Many American older adults experience some degree of cognitive decline, with roughly 20% developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI). While some individuals with MCI remain stable or revert to normal cognition, about a third progress to more serious cognitive conditions, such as dementia related to Alzheimer’s disease, within five years (Alzheimer’s Association, 2017). Given that more than 1 in 5 Americans will be at least 65 years old by 2030 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017), understanding the environmental needs of those facing cognitive decline becomes a significant social issue. Our series of projects have laid a solid groundwork for the innovative concept of “Cognitive Aging In Place (CAIP),” focusing on environmental mastery, environmental stimulation, environmental familiarity, social engagement, and physical comfort.
2:30 – 2:50pm
Report out / Discussion
Martha Greenway, Margaret Brackett
2:50 – 3:00pm
Closing Remarks
3:00 – 3:30pm
Poster Session / Networking
Refreshments