Scholars

Anna Marie Chang, MD, MSCE

Dr. Chang joined the faculty in the Department of Emergency Medicine as an Assistant Professor in July 2012.  She is a graduate of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and completed a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Dr. Chang's research interests are in studying patients with acute cardiopulmonary conditions and transitions of care.  Heart failure, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and ischemic heart disease account for a significant proportion of emergency department (ED) visits, hospital admissions (up to 70% of these patients are admitted through the ED) and repeat ED visits, and have a high rate of readmissions (up to 25% within 30 days).   Furthermore, Medicaid enrollees less than 64 years old had 45.8 ED visits per 100 enrollees compared with 24.0 visits per 100 for privately insured people.  Thus, reducing ED utilization and admissions for these conditions in the Medicaid population will greatly impact overall ED use, and present research has identified a lack of quality connections and transitions from hospital-to-home for patients with these specific conditions. 

In 2012, the state of Oregon restructured its Medicaid program into Coordinated Care Organizations, which are local health entities that are accountable for health outcomes of the entire population they serve.  Thus, Dr. Chang hopes to examine these unique changes to the model of care, and how they affect ED use for acute cardiopulmonary conditions.  She will conduct a mixed-methods study to identify CCO, ED and patient level factors that lead to changes in ED utilization and hospitalizations.  She will use the Oregon All Payers All Claims database to describe variation in repeat ED visit rates within CCOs.  Using interviews and surveys, she will identify the key strategies as proposed by CCOs to reduce ED visits for asthma, heart failure, and COPD.  Further interviews and surveys will determine how these key strategies are being implemented at the ED level.

Mentors: John McConnell, Ph.D, Deborah Cohen, Ph.D, Devan Kansagara, M.D., and Honora Englander, M.D.

Susan Rowell, MD, MCR

Dr. Rowell is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Trauma, Emergency Surgery, and Acute Care Surgery at OHSU. A graduate of the University of California Davis School of Medicine, she completed a residency in surgery at UC Davis and served as Chief Resident there before coming to OHSU in 2006. At OHSU, she completed a fellowship in Surgical Critical Care, joining the faculty in 2007. She serves as Director of OHSU's Surgical Critical Care Fellowship Training Program. This year she chaired the committee for the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, which re-wrote national guidelines for the management of mild traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Rowell's research interests focus on coagulation changes after traumatic brain injury (TBI), the number one cause of death and disability due to trauma. Management of TBI focuses on preventing secondary brain injury. Therefore, Dr. Rowell's initial study will examine the hypothesis that TBI induces an early and significant hypocoagulable state that can be characterized by thromboelastography, and that the severity of the derangement in coagulation is associated with progression of intracerebral hemorrhage. She will test this hypothesis in a prospective observational study of adult patients admitted to the Trauma Intensive Care Unit at Oregon Health & Science University with blunt TBI. The second aspect of this study will begin to explore the mechanism involved in TBI-associated coagulopathy using samples collected from the initial phase of the study. In addition to support from this K12, Dr. Rowell received the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma Research Fellowship Award.

Mentors:  Nabil Alkayed, MD, Ph.D. and David Farrell, Ph.D.