Recent News From the Associate Dean of Strategy and Innovation
The broad objective of the New Opportunities to Improve Outcomes (NOTIO) program is to fund innovative projects that can directly impact clinical care in any area of medicine. During the 2022 grant cycle, the University of Minnesota Medical School awarded a total of $35,000 to encourage new ideas and rapid prototyping of innovative clinical care models.
Two pilot projects were funded this year. The recipients were Dr. Zachary Kaltenborn and Dr. Raluca Gray.
Dr. Kaltenborn → Medications for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) can reduce the chance of HIV infection. The central objective of this project is to increase the number of PrEP-eligible youth and young adults receiving a PrEP prescription, thereby reducing the number of new HIV infections within this group.
An Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics (Joint Appointment), Division of Hospital Medicine, his undergraduate work was done at UC Santa Cruz. He attended the University of Washington School of Medicine and completed his Residency at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Kaltenborn is the Chief Resident of Internal Medicine and lists his academic interest and focus as Excocellualr Matrix (ECM) and Global Health.
Dr. Gray → Multidisciplinary approach for providing personalized patient care for airway stenosis. This multidisciplinary airway team (the collaborators submitting this grant) aims to create a customized care model for this patient population by implementing a remote patient monitoring telehealth tool.
Dr. Gray’s interests lie in improving the quality of life for her patients with voice, swallow, and breathing complaints. She is also interested in patients with spasmodic dysphonia, for which she can offer both medical interventions with botox injections and surgical options of selective laryngeal adductor denervation-reinnervation surgery. She is particularly interested in vocal fold pre-cancerous and cancerous changes for which she can offer both in-office and surgical laser procedures. Lastly, she is particularly interested in patients with swallow complaints due to age, prior surgery, prior radiation, or neurological conditions. She offers a multitude of in-office procedures, including in-office voice and swallows evaluation with video stroboscopy and functional endoscopic evaluation of swallowing, transnasal esophagoscopy, injections, and laser procedures. In the operating room, she offers both endoscopic and open approaches.
Associate Dean of Strategy and Innovation Clarence Shannon IV, MD, will also fund a pilot program for postpartum home blood pressure monitoring for patients with a diagnosis of chronic hypertension and/or a hypertensive diagnosis of pregnancy led by Dr. Bethany Sabol.
Dr. Sabol completed her MD at the University of Illinois at Chicago in addition to a focused curriculum on urban medicine and health disparities. She then completed her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Oregon Health and Science University and her fellowship in Maternal Fetal Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. In both residency and fellowship, Dr. Sabol championed multiple quality improvement initiatives, including the successful launch of a home blood pressure monitoring system, reducing hospital readmissions for women with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
This pilot program will demonstrate ways to further improve postpartum blood pressure control and reduce maternal readmissions in the first six weeks postpartum, maternal morbidity & mortality, and health inequities in postpartum follow-up care while simultaneously being cost-effective/cost-saving and widely accepted/utilized by patients.