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L.A. Care, the nation’s largest public health plan, will use a $15.6 million federal grant to help doctors throughout L.A. county to develop and implement electronic health records for their patients, it was announced Wednesday.

The grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will allow L.A. Care Health Plan to establish the Health Information Technology Regional Extension Center, which will provide technical assistance to doctors wishing to adopt and implement electronic health records, said L.A. Care’s Howard Kahn.

“L.A. Care’s relationship with physicians and the safety net will help these doctors implement and achieve meaningful use of electronic health records, which is critically important as they get ready for coverage expansion under health care reform,” he said.

Thousands of doctors and other health care providers in Los Angeles County will benefit from the center’s services, which will include on-site technical assistance, education and training, said Dr. Elaine Batchlor, also of L.A. Care.

By Rachel Vegas, Daily Trojan

Hoping to make science more accessible to a wide range of people, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) have teamed up to create a new initiative that combines science and interactive media.

The Creative Science Studio, known as CS2, aims to educate large audiences about contemporary issues in the world of science through interactive media outlets.

The idea began with NSF, which developed the concept along with USC’s Research Advancement Offices in Washington, D.C. NSF had partnered with USC before and approached the school to discuss the possibility of a science and interactive media collaboration.

“NSF is worried about scientific illiteracy in the country, ” said Elizabeth Daley, Dean of School, SCA. “They want to find a way to better educate the public in fundamental scientific ideas, principles and research.”

CS2 will launch in fall 2010. It will not be a physical space on campus but rather a virtual environment run through SCA.

NSF has provided SCA with innovative resources, such as new devices and data visualization methods, to help the school achieve the goals of CS2.

The hope, Daley said, is that researchers nationwide will take advantage of CS2’s resources to make their research and findings accessible to the general population.

“If a researcher gets a major grant, they bring it to us to help them with their educational components,” Daley said. “The end result could be anything from a documentary to a game to a website.”

Cinematic art students and faculty will have the opportunity to engage in various research projects and new forms of production through CS2. The opportunities to work with top researchers from multiple disciplines may also arise.

“This novel and creative partnership will enlist the power of the entertainment media to inspire audiences to learn more about science and engineering, to develop a network of scientific experts, facilities and instruments available to the arts, and bring new technologies in sight, sound, and video to marketplace,” said Thomas Kalil, deputy director for policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

As a federal agency, NSF is looking to promote President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign, which emphasizes the importance of excelling in the sciences.

Air Pollution Linked to Progression of Atherosclerosis
Study co-author Howard N. Hodis
By Meghan Lewit on February 12, 2010 2:39 PM

Keck School of Medicine of USC researchers, in collaboration with international partners in Spain and Switzerland and colleagues in California, have found that exposure to air pollution accelerates the thickening of artery walls that leads to cardiovascular disease. The study, which will be published in the journal PloS ONE, is the first to link outdoor air quality and progression of atherosclerosis in humans.

Researchers found that artery wall thickening among people living within 100 meters of a Los Angeles highway progressed twice as quickly as those who lived farther away. “The fact that we can detect progression of atherosclerosis in relation to ambient air pollution above and beyond other well-established risk factors indicates that environmental factors may play a larger role in the risk for cardiovascular disease than previously suspected,” said study co-author Howard N. Hodis, director of the USC Atherosclerosis Research Unit and professor of medicine and preventive medicine at the Keck School.

Atherosclerosis — or stiffening and calcification of arteries — is a condition that leads to heart attacks, stroke and related deaths. Animal studies conducted in recent years have shown that inhalation of particulate matter from traffic and other sources accelerates atherosclerosis, but there previously has been very little study of these effects on humans.

“Until now, no study has ever investigated whether the slow but chronic process of the development of atherosclerosis would be affected by ambient air pollution,” said study principal investigator Nino Kuenzil, vice director of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. Kuenzil began work on the study while a faculty member at the Keck School.

The findings were based on five randomized controlled trials — conducted by investigators at the Atherosclerosis Research Unit during the past decade — which involved linking the measured effects of outside air pollution to the progression of atherosclerosis in 1,483 participants in the Los Angeles area.

Colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley developed novel spatial models and air pollution measurements to estimate particulate matter all across Southern California and to estimate proximity from participants’ homes to high exposure zones near highways and traffic corridors.

The investigators found that annual progression of artery wall thickness among those living within 100 meters of a highway was accelerated by 5.5 micrometers a year, more than twice the average progression of people who lived farther away.

The findings support emerging evidence that high-traffic corridors are unhealthy residential locations, researchers said.

With funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Obama administration, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the investigators have launched two large studies examining the risk of ambient air pollution in the early development of atherosclerosis in children and young adults where cardiovascular risk factor is low, Hodis said.

“Should studies in children and young adults support our current findings in adult populations concerning ambient air pollution and atherosclerosis risk, the public health implications and preventive strategies for further reducing cardiovascular disease will have global implications for both developed as well as developing industrial nations,” he said.

The study was funded across six components of the National Institutes of Health.

 

A program funded by USC’s Clinical Translational Science Institute is helping create a computerized speech translation system to be used in clinics and hospitals to bolster communication between physicians and patients.

Led by Shrikanth Narayanan of the USC Veterbi School of Engineering, the SpeechLinks Project team includes two researchers from the Keck School of Medicine, professors Win May and Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati. SpeechLinks, a speech-to-speech translation system for clinics and hospitals, is designed to translate between English and Spanish. In practice, a doctor and patient are connected by two headsets to a computer that performs the translation in near real time.

The system is designed to learn from its encounters, referring tougher translation problems to a human translator who can review the entire conversation and fill in the gaps where the machine is having trouble translating. The doctor may also elect to refer the conversation to a human translator if necessary.

While their colleagues at the Veterbi School develop the technical infrastructure for the system, May and Baezconde-Garbanati draw on their medical and cultural experience to develop test cases with which to “train” the system. As May notes, “In translation, if you don’t understand the cultural context, the translation may not be as effective as you want it to be.”

Baezconde-Garbanati described their role as developing “alternative culturally relevant scenarios,” to test the system, including “important cultural values and variations in cases and disease conditions.” As she explained, this is the first study of its kind in the United States—one that deals with the Spanish-speaking population. In developing, the Spanish vocabulary of the system, they are attempting to build a “culturally intelligent” tool.

Both hope that this system can help assist overburdened interpreters in public health systems like Los Angeles County’s, or in remote areas without access to interpreters. Baezconde-Garbanati, who studies the role of culture in health behaviors, said, “Competent current interpreters are maxed out in terms of demand. Leaving simultaneous interpretation to family members, janitors in the hallway, or children is a thing of the past. . . [SpeechLinks] could help them make decisions regarding where to send their prescious resources.”

Written by Joe Peters for “The Weekly.”