USF Health attained a 100% score on its most recent Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) assessment, a measurement required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to track how well hospitals and medical groups perform on key areas that benefit patients.

“MIPS helps set standards of care, including standards based on cost, and this strong score demonstrates that we are meeting national benchmarks on how we care for patients,” said Terri Ashmeade, MD, professor and chief quality officer for USF Health.

“This incredible score puts USF Health and its accountable care organizations among the very top of practices in this country, showing that we are maximizing value by achieving the highest possible quality outcomes for the lowest cost.”

The 100% score puts USF Health in the Exceptional Performance category, a significant accomplishment given USF Health’s highly specialized group practice and complexity of its patient population compared to the average practice, she said.

MIPS (Merit-Based Incentive Payment System) is part of the Quality Payment Program authorized under 2015 MACRA legislation that introduced a new Medicare value-based reimbursement system. MIPS is one of the ways the Quality Payment Program aims to reward value and outcomes (rather than just volume of care), tying payments to quality and cost-effective care. Performance is measured through four key areas: quality, improvement activities, promoting interoperability, and cost.

Ensuring that USF Health patients have a smooth transition of care from the hospital back into the outpatient practice and avoid readmission is an example of the continuity of care that MIPS is measuring, Dr. Ashmeade said.

At USF Health, the journey to achieve this outstanding MIPS score speaks volumes to how we are, collectively, advancing toward our primary goal of offering advanced, compassionate care to patients, she said.

In the video above, USF Health leaders and frontline workers look back on the successes, challenges and emotions they experienced while dealing with an incredibly challenging year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Their stories include developing testing supplies now used around the world, creating programs aimed at treating vulnerable populations and helping rapidly develop and roll out vaccines against the disease, which Dr. Charles Lockwood, MD, Dean of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine said “rivals the moon landing.”

USF Health College of Nursing vice dean Denise Maguire, PhD, administers a vaccine shot.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a lasting impact on the way we live, work and interact. Watch Dr. Bryan Bognar, vice dean of the Morsani College of Medicine Department of Medical Education, discuss USF Health’s medical education successes and challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The COVID-19 pandemic is having a lasting impact on the way we live, work and interact. Watch Dr. Terri Ashmeade, chief quality officer at USF Health, discuss patient safety in the clinics.

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The COVID-19 pandemic is having a lasting impact on the way we live, work and interact at USF Health. Watch Jacqueleen Reyes Hull, Ed.D, assistant vice president for administration at USF Health, discuss how daily life has changed for faculty and staff.

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USF Health medical student Tampa Hutchens discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected medical education and what students and USF faculty have done to keep their medical training on track.

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USF Health Dean of the Taneja College of Pharmacy Dr. Kevin Sneed discusses the role pharmacists play in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Sneed stresses how pharmacists are helping find promising treatments, connecting with patients virtually to go over their medication regimens and further strengthening the healthcare sector’s approach to fighting the pandemic.

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USF Health Dean of Public Health, Dr. Donna Petersen, discusses the importance of public health especially during pandemics like COVID-19. Dean Petersen stresses the importance of following CDC guidelines — washing hands thoroughly, wearing a mask and maintaining social distance — to avoid contracting and spreading COVID-19. Dr. Petersen leads the COVID-19 Task Force and lays out plans to reopen USF to students, faculty and staff.

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Nurses protect the health and well-being of patients every day and play an integral role in our nation’s health care system. In the latest USF Health Brief, Dr. Usha Menon, interim dean of the USF Health College of Nursing, discusses the challenges and changes nurses and nurse training face during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Dr. Stephen Liggett, USF Health associate vice president for research, discusses how COVID-19 has changed how research is conducted and the types of conditions researchers work.

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Dr. Deborah DeWaay, USF Health associate dean of undergraduate medical education, discusses the current and long-term changes in medical education due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Dr. Mark Moseley, USF Health’s Chief Clinical Officer, discusses how physicians and other health care providers are using telehealth services and technology to remotely care for patients, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

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In the first USF Health Briefs, Dr. Charles Lockwood, Dean of the Morsani College of Medicine, talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our way of life and access to health care, the lessons the virus is teaching the medical community, and how long it may take before we can safely mingle in large groups again.

USF Health attained a 100% score on its most recent Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) assessment, a measurement required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to track how well hospitals and medical groups perform on key areas that benefit patients.

“MIPS is about setting standards of care for all of our patients and, by earning a 100%, we are clearly demonstrating that we are meeting national benchmarks on how we care for patients,” said Terri Ashmeade, MD, professor and chief quality officer for USF Health.

“This perfect score validates that we are not a high-cost organization and puts USF Health among the very top of USA practices in value.”

The 100% score puts USF Health in the Exceptional Performance category, a significant accomplishment given USF Health’s highly specialized group practice and complexity of its patient population compared to the average practice, she said.

Morsani Center for Advanced Healthcare.

MIPS (Merit-Based Incentive Payment System) is part of the Quality Payment Program authorized under 2015 MACRA legislation that introduced a new Medicare value-based reimbursement system. MIPS is one of the ways the Quality Payment Program aims to reward value and outcomes (rather than just volume of care), tying payments to quality and cost-effective care. Performance is measured through four key areas: quality, improvement activities, promoting interoperability, and cost.

Ensuring that our patients have a smooth transition of care from the hospital back into our outpatient practice  and are avoiding readmission is an example of the continuity of care that MIPS is measuring, Dr. Ashmeade said.

For a deeper dive into MIPS, visit https://qpp.cms.gov/mips/overview

South Tampa Center for Advanced Healthcare.

At USF Health, the journey to achieve this outstanding MIPS score speaks volumes to how we are, collectively, advancing toward our primary goal of offering advanced, compassionate care to patients, said Mark Moseley, MD, chief medical officer for USF Health.

“This outstanding MIPS score shows that our constant drive to make life better for our patients and their families dovetails nicely with efforts to maximize value by achieving the highest possible quality outcomes for the lowest cost,” Dr. Moseley said. “Our social contract with our community is to provide that value, and the improvements in processes, data analytics, and care coordination brought about by our MIPS efforts help us do just that for those we are privileged to serve.”

Streamlining how patients access their health care providers – from the first encounter to the myriad details for overall operations – could greatly impact patient satisfaction and quality care.

That’s why USF Health is implementing a process improvement program that will help clinical and operational staff work more efficiently, both individually and collectively, all with the goal of making great patient experiences at every point along a patient’s journey with USF Health providers.

As a first step, USF Health clinical and operational teams recently took part in a workshop focused on optimizing workflow of staff and fine tuning the steps patients take as they navigate our clinics.

USF Health employees participate in a workflow exercise at the South Tampa Center. From left, Evany Dera, a regional nurse manager-satellites; Joe Kirkner, a clinic manager; Dr. Anvm Ahmed; Erica Rabeav, a front desk and financial supervisor at the Morsani Center third floor; Sally Abner, RN, clinical nurse manager, who talks about patients’ time in a procedure room.

The workshop incorporated a method called Lean to improve organizational efficiency. Lean is a set of philosophies and methods for operating at the most efficient level to maximize value and quality of care for patients. It reduces waste, and could improve waiting times for patients.

The workshop included experts from the Virginia Mason Institute to teach Lean Methodologies to several dozen USF Health team members, including RCO staff, facilities management, nurses, medical assistants, and providers.

“We are essentially investing in inter-professional team learning and improvements to deliver the best quality care for our patients,” said Terri Ashmeade, MD, MS, CPHQ, chief quality officer for USF Health and associate dean for Continuing Professional Development.

“Using Lean methodologies and creating effective workflow processes, we are able to better serve our patients. It’s a process improvement that creates cross-functional teams that will allow us to become more efficient and effective in providing patient care.”

The idea, she said, is that everyone in the organization is incorporating these patient-centric ideas in every day workflow.

“The primary goal is to eliminate anything that does not add value for patients,” Dr. Ashmeade said.

Process Improvement is the proactive task of identifying, analyzing and improving upon existing business processes within an organization for optimization and to meet new quotas or standards of quality. The effort continually asks in every process how efficiently resources are being used and what value is being added for the customer. Lean frequently includes a system called 5S, standing for sort, sweep, simplify, standardize, and sustain/self-discipline.

The Lean program at USF Health is part of a larger effort to provide a better patient experience and improve quality of care.

“Because of its focus on understanding and optimizing the role of each member of the team , I think this training aligns nicely with several USF strategic initiatives, specifically inter professional learning and practice, and our cultural transformation goals around continuous learning and improvement,” Dr. Ashmeade said.

“In the end,” she said, “it’s about making life better for patients.”

Kim Clifford, director of Clinical Operations, explains the effective use of daily work huddles for clinical teams.

USF Health Cardiologist Dr. Bibhu D. Mohanty also took part in the tour.

Family Medicine’s Dr. Karim Hanna was part of the workflow tour.

Photos by Freddie Coleman and Allison Long, USF Health multimedia journalists.

For generations, nurses tending to newborns have been able to tell the subtle difference between a baby’s cry of hunger and that of pain.

That ability to distinguish those differences is now being combined with continuous facial expression recognition software in hopes of offering a new way to help health care providers more precisely gauge whether a baby is experiencing pain or simply needing a diaper change.

Neonatal experts in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine are partnering with facial expression recognition experts in the USF College of Engineering to build data that combines known information collected through facial expression recognition capabilities and the known information from nurses who have years of training and on-the-job experience using the neonatal infant pain scale (NIPS).

“Our intent is to develop a methodology and technology to allow us to better detect when the patients we are caring for experience pain,” said Terri Ashmeade, MD, professor of pediatrics in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine and chief quality officer for USF Health.

“Babies hospitalized in the NICU experience many painful procedures and research has shown that these painful experiences are associated with altered development of the infants brains and can impact them long term. Babies cannot tell us when they are experiencing pain, or how intense their pain might be. So the most important thing about this research is that, by coupling computer vision technology with vocal responses, we can have a fuller understanding for what our patients are experiencing and know when we should intervene. And that precision in knowing when they are feeling pain would prevent us from exposing babies to medications they don’t need.”

Dr. Terri Ashmeade at Tampa General Hospital’s Jennifer Leigh Muma NICU.

The preliminary study looked at 53 infants in the Jennifer Leigh Muma Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Tampa General Hospital. Using small video cameras attached to infant incubators, the researchers collected footage of the young patients before, during and after scheduled procedures and interventions. The footage was examined later through facial expression analysis software and was also coupled with vital signs that were measured in sync with the footage, with audio that was also collected, and with near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which measures oxygen levels in the brain.

All of those datasets – facial expressions, body movements, sounds of crying and vital signs – were combined and then matched with the nurses’ own professional expertise of what particular cries and facial expressions mean, the NIPS score. The resulting overlay could provide a tool in a NICU that would constantly monitor a baby and then alert the health care team when there is evidence the baby is feeling any distress from pain. Currently, these NICU-skilled nurses build in typically hourly assessments of the infants to gauge a NIPS score – the new technology would offer round-the-clock monitoring.

Cameras continually monitor the newborns.

This new use of computer vision and pattern recognition adds a new dimension to existing software, said Rangachar Kasturi, PhD, the Douglas W. Hood Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, USF College of Engineering.

“USF’s expertise in computer vision and pattern recognition is well known, so naturally we have a strong interest in using it to help this population,” Dr. Kasturi said.

“The key difference here is that we’re not trying to recognize or identify a face, we are measuring the baby’s muscle movement and how their creases and lines move, to determine if they are experiencing pain. We are comparing the nurses’ scores with those we get from the technology to determine how accurate our scores are. We want to replicate what these talented nurses do so the babies can be constantly monitored.”

USF engineering professor Dr. Rangachar Kasturi and USF doctoral student Ghada Zamzmi. Photo by Ryan Noone.

In gauging facial expression, capturing known meanings in babies can be difficult, said Ghada Zamzmi, a doctoral student in the USF Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

“There are common expressions such as happy, sad, angry etc. that we know about adults, but those cannot be applied to newborns,” Zamzmi said. “In this study, we are capturing the facial muscle movements in video, or optical flow, and classifying them as relating to pain or no pain. In addition to facial expression, we are automatically analyzing other signals such as sounds, body movement, and heart rate to increase the reliability of detecting pain in case of missing data. We believe developing an automated multimodal system can provide a continuous and quantitative assessment of infants’ pain and lead to improved outcomes. ”

This type of technology and assessment could be used beyond the NICU, including for any patient who is not able to communicate directly with their health care team about whether or not they’re experiencing pain, such as elderly patients with dementia, Dr. Ashmeade said.

NICU babies are some of the most vulnerable and require multiple medical procedures – even surgeries – that are painful, Dr. Ashmeade said.

Babies may require multiple medical procedures while in the neonatal intensive care unit.

“These newborns, many of them born prematurely, cannot communicate their feelings, which is why and how the nursing staff has become the go-to experts for gauging the babies’ needs,” she said. “While we have had many successes in neonatal care and improving survival of our babies, what we really want to focus on is a great outcome. Anything we can do to foster appropriate development, especially of the brain, is what we want for these babies.”

In addition to Drs. Ashmeade and Kasturi, and Zamzmi, researchers on the study included: Chih-Yun Pai, Dr. Dmitry Goldgof, and Dr. Yu Sun. This preliminary research was supported, in part, by a 2016 USF Women’s Health Collaborative Seed Grant. The team has applied for further funding with the National Institutes of Health and expects to hear if an expanded study is approved by next Fall. In June, the research will be presented in Norway at the Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis, which is sponsored by the International Association for Pattern Recognition.

Story by Sarah Worth, photos by Eric Younghans, USF Health Communications

USF Health’s Terri Ashmeade, MD, was among the senior women faculty members recently selected for the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program for Women.

Dr. Ashmeade, associate professor of pediatrics in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, Chief Quality Officer for USF Health, and medical director for the NICU at Tampa General Hospital, was named a fellow in the 2016-2017 Class of ELAM.

Dr. Terri Ashmeade directs the Muma NICU at TGH and leads patient safety for USF Health.

“The 2016-2017 ELAM Class reflects an exciting diversity in many categories, including discipline, ethnicity, age, and geography,” said Diane Magrane, MD, director of the ELAM program, in her letter notifying this year’s fellows of their inclusion into ELAM. “What each of you share is a conviction that academic health centers must change in response to today’s societal, technological, and market forces and a desire to play a leadership role in guiding this process. The faculty and staff of ELAM look forward to helping you achieve this ambitious goal.”

ELAM, based at Drexel University College of Medicine, prepares senior women faculty at schools of medicine, dentistry, and public health to move into positions of leadership. ELAM’s intensive one-year fellowship program encompasses executive education, personal leadership assessments and coaching, and networking and mentoring activities. To be accepted into the highly competitive program, each Fellow must be nominated and supported by the dean or other senior official of her institution.

ELAM was established in 1995 to carry on the legacy of advancing women in medicine begun by the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, the nation’s first women’s medical school and predecessor of today’s Drexel University College of Medicine.

USF Health faculty who were in previous ELAM classes include:

Patricia Emmanuel, MD, 2009-2010

Catherine Lynch, MD, 2012-2013

Lynn C. Moscinski, MD, 1996-1997

Kailie R. Shaw, MD, 1995-1996

Lynn C. Wecker, PhD, 1997-1998

Julie Y. Djeu, PhD, 1996-1997

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Because the best way for anyone to improve is to hear feedback, providers and support staff across the USF Physicians Group will soon know how patients feel about the care they receive at USF Health, from their first point of contact to direct interaction with providers to their checking out.

USFPG is partnering with Press Ganey©, a national firm specializing in measuring patient satisfaction and patient delivery, to implement the standardized patient satisfaction survey of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS).

The information collected will be used to define and design improvement strategies that will improve patient care and build stronger patient safety initiatives, as well as be used as benchmarking opportunities with other large academic physician practices, said Terri Ashmeade, MD, associate professor of pediatrics, chief of Pediatrics at Tampa General Hospital, and chief quality officer for USF Health.

“Of all the things we measure in health care, our assessment of the patient’s experience of our care is one of the most important,” Dr. Ashmeade said. “When patients feel welcomed into an environment of care, when they feel their providers are spending adequate time with them and really listening to their issues, they become more engaged in their own care.”

Dr. Terri Ashmeade

The data from this survey will also help define USFPG strengths, which can help elevate the digital relevance of the USF Physicians Group and its providers. While recommendations from friends and family might have helped in choosing a doctor in the past, more and more health care consumers of today are searching online for options for both doctors and facilities.

“Consumers are becoming much more sophisticated,” Dr. Ashmeade said. “There are many tools available to them by which they can select providers and assess providers, like they assess other services they receive in the community. So, by USF Health being proactive and sending surveys and getting this type of feedback now, we can start getting ahead of the curve in understanding what our patients really expect from us and putting those types of services in place.”

The first surveys are being sent this week – both electronically and by mail. Over the course of months, more than 12,000 USF Health patients across the region will be asked how satisfied they are with the care they receive by USF Physicians Group and their opinion of nearly every touch point they encounter. After all survey results have been carefully examined to ensure their accuracy and validity, they will be shared with faculty.

The aim of this comprehensive patient satisfaction survey is to glean the greatest amount of information possible for analysis – the more robust the data, the greater the options are for targeted, successful improvement, said Phillip Cox, Esq., LHRM, associate vice president for Quality, Safety and Risk.

“We want to capture as many patients as possible so we have the best survey results as possible,” he said.

Phil Cox

That expected volume is why Press Ganey is helping.

“That’s the main reason we’re bringing them in is to maintain the integrity over the data,” Cox said. “They’re the experts. A lot of places utilize homegrown surveys and we decided it would be better for us to invest because we care so much about our patients and we want this data to be as solid as possible. There’s a lot of science that goes into completing a good survey and managing the data that comes out. What’s really important to us is that the data is as accurate as possible so we can use it to enhance the care of our patients, first and foremost, but also to make sure our providers understand that the integrity and attribution in this information is appropriate.”

This standardized survey is designed to encompass the entire patient experience, from the moment they walk in the door until the moment they leave. For USFPG providers, the survey will help them understand what patients expect. Feedback, both complimentary and critical, will help USFPG providers know where they stand, giving them a baseline for implementing improvements.

Making targeted changes that improve patient care will require providers to have learning agility in order to be effective, Cox said.

“I want providers at USFPG to know that this is a very positive process and it’s going to help us provide that exceptional care we all come in every day and strive for,” he said. “It’s going to enhance the communication we have with our patients. For the first time here at USF Health we’ll be able to truly hear what those needs are and help fulfill those needs for our patients.”

This story is part of a series highlighting faculty who are shining examples of quality and compassionate patient care and patient safety. Every day, these health care providers put their patients first. In the process, they create successful models of advanced care focused on empathy, safety, technology and evidenced-based medicine, models that carry through everything they do – into their practice, their teaching, their research, their community outreach, and into the USF Physicians Group.

Neonatal intensive care units (NICU) have some of our most vulnerable patients, babies in need of expert critical care. Because every interaction, every touch, with these newborns must be precise, with little margin for error, these NICUs must be a paragon of optimum patient safety.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpyBHjp8xTc

Terri Ashmeade, MD, embraces every aspect of that realm. She is associate professor of pediatrics in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine and medical director for the Jennifer Leigh Muma NICU at Tampa General Hospital. She is also the newly named Chief Quality Officer for USF Health. Her experience in NICUs and her active roles in defining best standards for patient safety helped pave the way for the new position, a job that aims to elevate quality care and patient safety across USF’s hospital partners and inpatient and outpatient facilities.

Dr. Terri Ashmeade directs the Muma NICU at TGH and leads patient safety for USF Health.

What defines a health care provider’s best approach to care, the one thing that ensures the best outcome for patients? Dr. Ashmeade boils it down to one word: data.

“In order to improve we need data,” said Dr. Ashmeade, adding that data rules in the Muma NICU environment. “Measurement is very important and we try to measure everything, from how long it took us to take a baby from the delivery room to the NICU to the temperature in the delivery room and how that temperature relates to the baby’s progress.

“As Chief Quality Officer, I’ll be able to help others understand our data, get the data they don’t have, understand it, use it to help us improve, and then measure our improvements along the way.”

Dr. Ashmeade said she realizes that patient safety can seem vague for a lot of us, a term that can bring to mind obvious scenarios of incorrect prescriptions and surgical procedures. But true patient safety is more than just preventing accidents.

“The most obvious forms of patient safety are what we hear in the news – a patient has an operation on the wrong body part or a patient gets a medication they weren’t prescribed,” Dr. Ashmeade said. “But there are many more subtle things that can go wrong. People who come into a hospital and get an infection related to a catheter or the overuse of medical treatments and X-rays, for example. It’s the more subtle things we do for patients, or don’t do for patients, that we need to pay attention to.”

Nurses and residents review daily progress of babies in the Muma NICU with Dr. Ashmeade.

Enhanced training for resident physicians and incorporating safety into the medical school curriculum are a couple of the ways Dr. Ashmeade aims to fill the pipeline with health care providers who are proficient in patient safety, which will improve patient outcomes.

“When I was a medical student we rarely heard the words ‘patient safety’,” she said. “We all assumed the care we were delivering was safe and thought that, if we were smart and if we were careful, all our patients would get the best care possible. But since then we’ve learned that, even with the best effort and the best intentions, we’re human beings and we can make mistakes and we can miss things. Learning about the science of patient safety and the science of quality improvement will help move us to the next level. At USF Health, we will train our medical students, nursing students, pharmacy students and public health students from the beginning so it becomes part of their everyday work and not something that’s an extra or an additional task. It has to be engrained.”

Building teams that center their efforts round safety will likely be the most effective approach. But that comes with a caveat: humans are reluctant to change habits and assume they already have good practices. And that’s where data steps in again.

“It’s hard to be measured; it can be shocking at first,” Dr. Ashmeade said. “Sometimes we have difficulty believing the numbers. So, my job will be to make sure I have the numbers right so people can trust them and use them effectively to improve. The first step is getting used to measuring our performance and being OK with ‘this is where I am’ whether we’re at the top or middle or bottom. Knowing where you are on that scale is critical, and data drives that.”

There are many tools for building that data, but Dr. Ashmeade noted that USF Health’s transition to Epic electronic health record system will be instrumental in tracking true improvement.

“With our EPIC implementation, we’ll be able to pull good data out,” she said. “I’ve used Epic for a long time at Tampa General so I know it’s a good system and will help us move forward in terms of collecting information on our patients, monitoring and tracking their progress and helping us improve safety across the board.”

Good data is what sparked Dr. Ashmeade’s drive for optimum patient safety and care, like that found in the NICU.

“When I became medical director of the NICU, it was the first time I really felt driven to understand what types of outcomes my patients were having,” she said. “And for the first time I had data I could look at that compared our performance to that of other similar neonatal units across the country and across the world. When I looked at those numbers, I saw that we were doing OK but weren’t at the top yet. That’s when I started training in quality improvement and patient safety to learn the techniques I could implement in the NICU to make changes that could get us to the top.”

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The delivery room and NICU at TGH are more than sources of data for Dr. Ashmeade. They are daily reminders for why she is so ambitious for the best patient outcomes possible.

“Patient safety is a huge part of neonatology, especially in that delivery room when there are so many things that have to happen within in a very short period of time,” she said.

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“We’re more like an orchestrated event or a dance. Before we go into a delivery we have what we call a huddle and decide who is going to do what in the room. Who is going make sure the baby is warm, who is going make sure the baby is breathing, who is going make sure the baby’s heart rate is appropriate. So when we get to the delivery room, we’re ready to go. We have specific places where we’re supposed to stand. There are specific communication strategies we use in those critical periods of the baby’s delivery. We don’t talk much, but when there is communication it’s very directed and specific so we are sure those specific steps take place at 30 seconds, at one minute, at one minute 30 seconds after birth. It’s really exciting when it all comes together but the fact is that it must all come together. It has to, for the baby’s sake.”

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“The best things happen to me every day,” she said. “I get to be present when babies are born. I get to be present for their first breath. I get to help them along, fragile babies, sick babies who might not make it, help them along their path. And then I have the pleasure of seeing their mom and dad, who weren’t sure if they we going to be able to take their baby home, actually take their baby home. I have the best job in the world.”

Photos and multimedia story by Sandra C. Roa, USF Health Office of Communications.

Dr. Maureen Groer leads a group of USF Health researchers in a five-year study examining the connection between digestive tract microbes and health and development

Tampa, FL (June 18, 2015) –The National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) has awarded more than $2.7 million to University of South Florida College of Nursing to study preterm infants’ gut microbiome and its effect on their growth and development.

Maureen Groer, PhD, Gordon Keller professor at USF College of Nursing, will lead a team of USF Health researchers to study “The preterm infant microbiome: Biological, behavioral and health outcomes at two and four years of age.” During this five-year research project, Dr. Groer and her team will study 100 low birth weight infants through age 4.

The microbiome is the DNA extracted from the population of bacteria and other microorganisms living in the human gut.

Maureen Groer, PhD, Gordon Keller professor at USF College of Nursing, is principal investigator of the study analyzing stool samples over time to test for any links between microbes in the digestive tract and preterm infants’ growth and health outcomes.

The USF study will help measure and evaluate the preterm babies’ development, health and growth over time to discover if there is a direct relationship to the gut microbiome. The researchers will analyze preterm babies’ stool samples, collected for a previous NIH-funded study on feeding and health outcomes led by Dr. Groer. That earlier study examined stool samples obtained over the infants’ six-week stays in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). For the new study, researchers will collect more samples from these same infants at ages 2 and 4.

“The gut microbiome is in most cases established at three years old – except in those who may have an abnormal gut microbiome,” Dr. Groer said. “Previous research shows that the gut microbiome has a direct relationship with brain neurochemistry, behavior, metabolism and the development of the immune system. So, there is a variety of behavior, allergic and autoimmune diseases including Crohn’s disease, autism, diarrhea and obesity that may be related to disruption of the gut microbiome.”

Dr. Groer will conduct the study with a leading team of USF Health researchers including Terri Ashmeade, MD, associate professor at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics and NICU director at Tampa General Hospital; Larry Dishaw, PhD, assistant professor at USF Pediatrics; Ming Ji, PhD, professor at USF Nursing; Kathleen Armstrong, PhD, professor at USF Pediatrics; and Elizabeth Miller, PhD, assistant professor at the USF Department of Anthropology.

The children’s microbiome samples will be measured at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) by Jack Gilbert, PhD, associate professor and environmental microbiologist at the ANL Department of Ecology and Evolution. Maternal stool samples will be analyzed in the USF College of Nursing’s state-of the-art bio-behavioral laboratory.

The latest NIH study will be conducted by a multidisciplinary team of USF researchers from across nursing, medicine and anthropology.

According to Center for Disease Control and Prevention, preterm births affect one out of nine infants born in the United States. Preterm births are the number one cause of death in infants and the leading cause of long-term neurological disabilities and developmental health problems in children.

“We’re excited to lead the way in this research,” said Dianne Morrison-Beedy, PhD, senior associate vice president of USF Health and dean of the College of Nursing. “I’m proud to be part of a college that conducts research that makes life better for people locally, regionally and nationally.”

The study is supported by NINR, part of National Institute of Health (NIH). NINR helps promote and improve the health of individuals, families and communities. NINR is part of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers that support and conduct clinical and basic science research on health and illness. For more information about NIH and NINR visit www.ninr.nih.gov. 

-USF Health-
USF Health’s mission is to envision and implement the future of health. It is the partnership of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, the College of Nursing, the College of Public Health, the College of Pharmacy, the School of Biomedical Sciences and the School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences; and the USF Physician’s Group. The University of South Florida is a global research university ranked 50^th in the nation by the National Science Foundation for both federal and total research expenditures among all U.S. universities. For more information, visit www.health.usf.edu.

Media Contact:
Vjollca “V” Hysenlika, College of Nursing Communications
(813) 974-2017, or vhysenli@health.usf.edu