Emergency Care Action Plans for Children with Medical Complexity
Through collaboration with families and clinicians, Christian D. Pulcini, MD, MEd, MPH, et al. developed an Emergency Care Action Plan (ECAP) to improve emergency care for children with medical complexity. Using human-centered design methods, the team identified key barriers to high-quality emergency care and created a practical care planning tool tailored to the needs of patients, caregivers, and providers. A companion family narrative highlights the real-world impact of coordinated emergency care planning. The research moves beyond theory by developing a deployable care planning tool and testing it in real-world healthcare systems, with the potential to improve outcomes, reduce avoidable utilization, and enhance care coordination.
Dr. Pulcini is a pediatric emergency physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center and UVM Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics at the University of Vermont, Larner College of Medicine. His current areas of research foci are pediatric firearm injury, emergency care of children with medical complexity, and mental health. His firearm research to date focuses on longitudinal outcomes, healthcare utilization, and costs of firearm injury. He is the current leader of the Children’s Hospital Association Research in Gun-Related Events (CHARGE) firearm research group, which is a national collaboration of interdisciplinary researchers dedicated to pediatric firearm related research.
