February 18, 2020

On February 13, Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers hosted a special celebration to unveil the new Sky High for Kids Immunotherapy Center that will officially open on 7 West Tower next month.

Texas Children’s Cancer Center staff, physician and nursing leaders, and invited guests attended the unveiling ceremony which began with a special blessing of the new oncology-hematology unit from Texas Children’s Chaplain Pam Krinock followed by remarks from Dr. Susan Blaney, director of Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers, and Brittany Hebert, Founder/CEO of Sky High for Kids.

“The Sky High for Kids Immunotherapy Center is a tremendous advance, that will be essential to achieving our goal of curing cancer in each and every child,” Blaney said. “We, along with our patients and their families, are grateful for our partnership with Sky High for Kids. This partnership is incredibly strong, because the founders and leaders of Sky High are equally driven and passionate as we are about caring for children who are diagnosed with cancer and eliminating this disease as quickly as possible.”

In 2018, Sky High for Kids committed $20 million over 15 years to Texas Children’s Hospital to establish the Sky High for Kids patient floor and the nation’s first Immunotherapy Center, along with supporting Texas Children’s Global HOPE initiative to improve pediatric cancer treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. This pledge will provide Texas Children’s with the necessary resources to continue our research and application of immunotherapy treatments, impact around the globe and quality of care and comfort for our patients.

“The Sky High for Kids patient floor is poised to serve children across Texas, in the United States, and ultimately around the world,” Hebert said. “We are grateful to be part of the Texas Children’s family and are honored to be a part of leading the charge to eradicate cancer right here in our hometown.”

After the unveiling ceremony, guests had the opportunity to tour the new Sky High for Kids patient floor on 7 West Tower, which will officially open on Wednesday, March 25. The spacious, state-of-the-art patient care floor includes 22 hematology-oncology rooms and 10 bone marrow transplant rooms. The newly renovated spaces also feature a multidisciplinary work area for the health care teams, larger family lounge and respite areas, a laundry room, and a beautiful art studio for patients and their families.

As Texas Children’s Cancer Center continues to pioneer new and emerging therapies for patients with cancer and blood disorders, the need for additional inpatient accommodations was crucial. The new space will allow care teams to better meet the needs of our patients while continuing to provide the highest quality care.

“We are very excited about the opening of our new oncology and hematology unit, and are very fortunate to have the best and brightest minds, dedicated to finding a cure for childhood cancer,” Blaney said. “Everyone in our Cancer Center, including our physician scientists, our research technicians, our clinical researchers, and the entire medical team, feel a tremendous sense of urgency to attaining this goal.”

Click here to learn more about Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers. Click here for more information about our philanthropic partner, Sky High For Kids, and their mission to end pediatric cancer.

February 17, 2020

When providers are evaluating how well they care for patients, they look to something called a risk-adjusted score to steer them in the right direction. Accurate risk scores are contingent upon solid patient data, which is abundant in the adult population but scarce when you are looking at children, especially children with complex conditions.

“Children are not little adults,” said Trudy Leidich, vice president of quality and medical staff services. “The course of care for a cardiac patient in pediatrics is very different than a cardiac patient in adults. We need to understand those differences so that we can better design the future of care for these kids.”

That’s why Texas Children’s, along with Children’s National Hospital, have invested in Configo Health Inc., a health care data and analytics company specializing in pediatrics.

Configo Health is addressing the lack of credible benchmarked data accessible both to administrators and clinicians working in pediatrics, and to patients and their families. Using both machine learning and more traditional retrospective analytics, Configo Health delivers actionable insight with near real-time relevance to improve patient safety and achieve better outcomes for children.

By creating a dataset that will cover the breadth of pediatric care, Configo Health will provide public ratings organizations with the option to use risk-adjusted performance data to assess the quality of care delivered by hospitals across the country more effectively.

“Today’s six month lag for benchmarked pediatric outcomes data just isn’t acceptable,” said Texas Children’s System Chief Quality Officer Dr. Eric Williams. “Configo’s move to near real-time insight will be a game changer for driving improvement. Quicker access to this validated data means better decisions can be made at the bedside leading to improved outcomes for the patients and families we serve.”

Configo’s analytic tools will integrate multiple pediatric data sets to accurately establish standardized risk scores, allowing providers to internally and externally compare themselves and push for better patient outcomes. Providers at Texas Children’s and Children’s National will be able to critically look at patients’ health outcomes, their risk scores, and understand why they had the outcome they did.

“If you look at just pure administrative data, it’s not going to capture the outcomes that you need to see in that complex patient population,” Leidich said. “We’re leveling the playing field.”

Connecting various data sources and generating a standardized pediatric risk score will also help children’s hospitals better compare their performance to each other.

“Having a risk-adjusted database allows for children’s hospitals that are big and complex to understand what we really are improving on and if we are outperforming,” Leidich said. “We’ll know there’s a value to the care we give.”

Experts in extracting administrative data from pediatric hospitals, Configo Health provides HIPAA-compliant processes, secure data storage facilities, data cleansing and sophisticated analytical processing. By analyzing and evaluating data, organizations can reduce serious safety events, reduce mortality rates, optimize length of stay and reduce readmissions.

“We are delighted to announce Texas Children’s Hospital and Children’s National Hospital, two of the top children’s hospitals in the nation, as our founding investors,” Configo Health CEO Craig Manson said. “These relationships go well beyond capital and will allow us to develop solutions that truly meet the needs of pediatric hospitals and their patients and families.”

Employees, patients and members of Texas Children’s entities are encouraged to take the 2020 Census. The effort to educate us is being led by The Section of Public Health Pediatrics and Community Benefits at Texas Children’s Hospital.

“Every 10 years, the census counts how many people live in each community to decide how much funding and representation in congress each community should receive,” said Cassie Jones, community initiatives coordinator. “An accurate census count means more programs and services will be available to the children and families we serve to support their full health and well-being.”

This funding supports everything from disaster recovery to higher education to road improvements to Medicaid funding.

“Texas Children’s is uniquely situated to reach hundreds of thousands of families and encourage them to complete the census,” Jones added.

She goes on to say that children under the age of five and low-income populations are often undercounted in the Census and it is estimated that communities miss out on $10,000 in funding for every person that is not counted. If children reside in more than one home, they should be counted where they stay most often, even if their parents don’t live there. If there is any confusion, children should be counted where they will be staying on Census Day – April 1st, 2020. For newborn babies still in the hospital on April 1, 2020, they should be counted at the home where they will live and sleep most of the time.

There are only nine questions and your responses cannot be shared with anyone. Every household in the United States should complete the census regardless of citizenship or immigration status. There are no questions about citizenship. For more information go to 2020 CENSUS.

Four easy ways to respond

Secure Internet: For the first time this year, the Census will be available online.
Respond by phone: Beginning March 1, 2020 the Census phone lines will be available at 1-800-923-8282.
Respond by mail: From March 12, 2020 through March 20, 2020 every home will receive an invitation in the mail to complete the Census. This information will explain how to complete the Census to help ensure our community receives the funding we need to help our patients, families, and community thrive!
In-Person interview: United States Census Bureau enumerators will visit residences that choose not to self-respond.

Important Census Dates
  • March 12 – 20: Households will begin receiving official Census Bureau mail with detailed information on how to respond to the 2020 Census online, by phone, or by mail.
  • March 30 – April 1: The Census Bureau counts people in shelters, at soup kitchens and mobile food vans, on the streets, and at non-sheltered, outdoor locations such as tent encampments.
  • April 1: Census Day is observed nationwide. By this date, every home will have received an invitation to participate in the 2020 Census. Once the invitation arrives, you should respond for your home in one of three ways: online, by phone, or by mail. When you respond to the census, you’ll tell the Census Bureau where you live as of April 1, 2020.
  • May – July: Census takers will begin visiting homes that have not responded to the 2020 Census to help make sure everyone is counted.
  • December: The Census Bureau will deliver apportionment counts to the President and Congress as required by law.
Need assistance?

Lines are open from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. CST seven days per week.

English (1-844-330-2020) and Spanish (1-844-468-2020).

If you service communities with different language needs, please check out the language specific phone lines at: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/2020-census/planning-management/memo-series/2020-memo-2019_18.html

Your name, title and department. How long have you worked here?
Clarissa Gonzalez, Inpatient Staff Nurse in Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). I have been in the PICU for almost five years.

Tell us how you found out you won a super star award.
I was charging at work and one of our managers, Amy Hathaway, was talking to me about how the unit was doing and our educator, Emily Nguyen, asked me if I could go drop a few papers in the break room. We walked in and everyone was in the break room including my family, fellow staff, and leadership team. I was so surprised and still had no idea what was happening. Amy read Emily’s letter recommending me for the award and then presented me with the super star award. I cried and there was cake and it was a moment I will never forget.

What does it mean to be recognized for the hard work you do? How has the organization helped you achieve your personal and professional goals?
I feel so honored. I love what I do and would keep doing the same things award or not, but feel very special to be recognized. I work with the best people and so to be selected out of all the amazing staff is incredibly humbling. Texas Children’s Hospital’s culture of compassion and service drives the sacrificial work that we all do. I feel privileged to work for an organization whose core values align with my own. Texas Children’s has supported my professional growth through an extensive graduate nurse residency, funded advanced certifications and empowered me to advance to expanded roles in the PICU.

What do you think makes someone at Texas Children’s a super star?
We work long stressful hours, and everyone I see is doing super star things. We support these families while away from our own families. Everyone I work with is dedicated to providing excellent care for our patients and for fellow staff. We feel the weight of the importance of the work we get to do and that drives everyone to go above and beyond. The patient that I give chemo to now has the potential to grow up and cure cancer because of what is happening at Texas Children’s. That potential is seen by all of our staff and it means that each employee has to come to work and this be more than just a job.

What is your motivation for going above and beyond every day at work?
The work that we get to do is the highest privilege. We meet families in the hardest moments of their lives and they trust us with their children. I cannot think of anything that demands more of a commitment to excellence than the honor of having any part in taking care of the families and being a part of their lives.

What is the best thing about working at Texas Children’s?
The people! And the dogs. But mostly the people. I tell everyone that Texas Children’s feels more like a family than a bunch of employees and it was so great to have my own family come and see and say the same things. My family was in awe about what amazing people I work with. They were impressed with the technology and architecture of Legacy Tower but they can’t stop talking about how kind and caring everyone in the PICU is. I always knew that I would love the patients and families but I had no idea how much I would also care about my PICU family.

What does it mean to you that everyone at Texas Children’s is considered a leader? What is your leadership definition?
I have learned something from everyone I have encountered at Texas Children’s, and to me, that is what I consider exemplifying leadership. We are called to set an example for others, and our conversations/interactions, even outside of work, set a precedent for who we are and what we represent. Texas Children’s employees are the best of the best, and we are called to be leaders not only in the institution, but in the communities and to other children’s hospitals who look to us for guidance and support.

Anything else you want to share?
Emily Nguyen, our nightshift educator, nominated me. Her support and the support of the PICU leadership team has created a culture that I am so proud to be a part of. I cannot thank Emily and all of my PICU family enough or have enough words to share what PICU means to me.

Fashioned in the same back-to-school theme as Texas Children’s Hi orientation, the New Employee Pep Rally recently allowed the most recent additions of our West Campus team to learn more about the organization, while also meeting leadership among the festive atmosphere of foam fingers, pompoms and lively music. Participants included new and recent hires based at West Campus, as well as those from specialty care clinics in the surrounding communities.

“West Campus is flourishing and we’re lucky to have all of you here,” President and CEO Mark A. Wallace told the new employees. “The key to our success has always been the people and the leadership.”

Wallace reminded the new hires that they, too, are leaders in their personal and professional lives, and encouraged them to develop their own leadership definitions. He also introduced himself and shook hands with every new employee at the pep rally, pausing often to pose for photos and selfies.

Take a look at the photo gallery below to see some of those shots.

February 11, 2020

On his blog this week, Mark Wallace shares why the Oscars is such a clear reminder of why we still have work to do to advance diversity and inclusion. Read more

Dr. David Poplack, director of Global Hematology Oncology Pediatric Excellence (HOPE) at Texas Children’s Cancer Center, was recently honored with the first-ever Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) Childhood Cancer Lifetime Achievement Award.

The ALSF is a non-profit pediatric cancer charitable organization that funds research to bring better treatments and cures to children with cancer, and provides emotional, financial and logistical support to childhood cancer families that makes their challenges more manageable.

“I am very honored to receive this Lifetime Achievement Award,” Poplack said. Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation has raised funds to advance innovative research, leading toward cures and improved quality of life for children with cancer.”

Since joining Texas Children’s in 1993, Poplack served as the Director of Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers for 25 years, growing the program from seven faculty members to nearly 200. As a world recognized leader and mentor in the field, Poplack has made a profound impact on the education of pediatric oncologists. He is Co-Editor of a textbook, The Principles and Practice of Pediatric Oncology, currently in its 7th edition, which has graced the desks of nearly every pediatric oncologist ever trained, and is the leading textbook in the field of pediatric oncology.

In July 2018, Poplack transitioned his role to serve as the Director of Global HOPE at Texas Children’s. The program is a comprehensive capacity-building program that works to improve pediatric cancer treatment in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has a nearly 90 percent mortality rate for the over 100,000 children who develop cancer each year. Global HOPE has a presence in seven African countries, has trained more than 1,800 local health care professionals and has treated over 8,000 patients since its inception.

In addition to his leadership roles at Texas Children’s, Poplack has been a guiding force for the ALSF research grant program, having served as a longtime member of ALSF’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Click here for more information about Texas Children’s Global HOPE program.