Kuppermann, Nathan — Internal Medicine, Emergency Medicine

Many important pediatric illnesses and injuries are treated by physicians in emergency departments and by paramedics prior to arrival in the emergency department. Although these health-care personnel strive to provide the best possible care for ill and injured children, their efforts are often hampered by lack of sufficient data from research studies to indicate the best methods of treatment. Research in pediatric emergency medicine is particularly difficult because of the infrequent occurrence of many serious diseases and infrequent adverse outcomes of more common ailments. Many of the barriers to obtaining necessary data could be overcome by the creation of a collaborative research network. In this proposal, we aim to create a collaborative research consortium among academic pediatric emergency departments. This consortium will function as one of several nodes in a new national collaborative research network called PECARN.