Course Faculty
Paula M Duncan, MD, FAAP (Editor)
Dr Paula Duncan is a retired professor of pediatrics from the University of Vermont, College of Medicine, where she worked at Vermont Child Health Improvement Program (VCHIP) and in medical student education. Before coming to Vermont in 1984, she completed her pediatric residency at Albany and her RWJ Clinical Scholars/Adolescent Medicine fellowship at Stanford, where she remained on the faculty for 5 years. During the 1990s, she served as the Vermont Maternal Child Health Director and the director of the Planning Division for the VT Agency of Human Services. In 2011 she served as president of the Vermont Medical Society.
Nationally, she is a coeditor of the AAP Bright Futures Preventive Services Guidelines and since 2003 has been a member of the AAP Bright Futures Implementation Steering Committee. Her research has related to the practical side of well-child visit guideline implementation in diverse primary care practice settings. This has included a focus on parent partnership and the use of strength-based approaches.
In Vermont her work has been recognized by the Vermont AAP chapter’s Green Mountain Pediatrician award as well as the UVM College of Medicine Medical Student class of 2008 Dignity in Medicine Award and the class of 2009 Gender Equity Award. She has received several national American Academy of Pediatrics awards, including the 2011 Abraham Jacobi Award, the AAP’s yearly award for contribution to the health and well-being of the nation’s children.
Patricia A. Braun, MD, MPH, FAAP (Lead SME)
Dr Braun has been practicing general pediatrics for the past 19 years at Denver Health, a large safety-net health care system in Colorado that serves a largely Hispanic population. She is an associate professor of pediatrics and family medicine at the University of Colorado, Anschutz School of Medicine and a clinical associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine. She conducts oral health disparity research with support from NIH/NIDCR and various foundations through the Children’s Outcomes Research and Colorado Native Oral Health Research Programs at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center and the Colorado School of Public Health.
Tonya Chaffee, MD, MPH, FAAP (Lead SME)
Dr Chaffee completed pediatric residency, chief residency, and subspecialty fellowship training for Adolescent Medicine at University of California, San Francisco. She subsequently completed an academic fellowship in violence prevention through the California Wellness Foundation at San Francisco General Hospital. During this fellowship, she earned her MPH at UC Berkeley while conducting research and policy work in violence prevention, including training providers in youth violence prevention.
Currently, Dr Chaffee is an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco at San Francisco General Hospital. She is SFGH’s medical director of the Child and Adolescent Support, Advocacy and Resource Center, which is the sexual assault center for the city and county of San Francisco. She is also the director of Teen and Young Adult Health Center at SFGH and director of an elective for pediatric residents on adolescent reproductive health and an elective on child/adolescent physical and sexual abuse. She is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, and is involved with several other local Bay Area youth organizations. She is passionate about advancing the education of providers in caring for adolescents and young adults, and teaches other faculty, residents, nurse practitioner students, and medical students in all areas of health care for youth, with a particular emphasis for underserved youth populations (eg, immigrant, foster care, incarcerated youth, and LGBT youth).
Amy Belisle, MD, FAAP
Dr Belisle grew up in Yarmouth, Maine and attended Harvard University and the University of Vermont College of Medicine. She completed her pediatric residency at the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital at Maine Medical Center in 2002. She returned to the States in 2007 after serving in the Air Force in at Yokota Air Base (AB) Japan and Andrews AFB for four years. When she was stationed at Yokota AB, she was as a general pediatrician for 2 years and then served as a flight surgeon and was the flight commander of the Flight Medicine Flight overseeing the Flight Medicine Clinic and the Immunization Clinic her last year.
From 2007 to 2010, Dr Belisle was a pediatric hospitalist at Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC) in Lewiston, Maine. From 2009 to 2010, she was the physician leader for the Maine AAP CQN Asthma Pilot, a practice improvement collaborative with 12 pediatric sites across the state. Currently, she the director of Child Health Quality Improvement at Quality Counts, Maine, and is working on the Improving Health Outcomes for Children Program (IHOC)/CHIPRA grant.
She is directing a 4-year learning collaborative called First STEPS (Strengthening Together Early Preventive Services). She created the Maine Child Health Improvement Partnership (ME CHIP) in 2011 as part of the IHOC/CHIPRA grant work. In addition, she is medical director of the Developmental Systems Integration (DSI) Project, a one-year planning grant to work toward improving developmental surveillance and screening across child health and education sectors in the state in 2013–2014. Dr. Belisle is a member of the Board of the Maine Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
Gale R. Burstein, MD, MPH, FAAP, FAAP, FSAM
Dr Burstein is the Erie County Commissioner of Health and a clinical professor of pediatrics at the SUNY at Buffalo School Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. She attended SUNY at Buffalo School of Medicine; completed a pediatric residency at Case Western Reserve University-Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, OH; received adolescent medicine fellowship training at the University of Maryland; completed an STD prevention fellowship and a Master’s in Public Health at John's Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD; and worked as a Medical Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr Burstein is chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) NYS Chapter 1 Committee on Adolescence and a member of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) Board of Directors. She is currently working on strategies to implement population-based surveillance using health information technology and improve access to sexual health care services in Erie County. A pediatric adolescent medicine physician, she has coauthored SAHM and AAP position papers on sexual health policy and has been published in various scientific journals, including JAMA, Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and Sexually Transmitted Infections.
Richard J. Chung, MD, FAAP
Dr Chung is the director of adolescent medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, and is an assistant professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. He earned his medical degree at Yale University School of Medicine and trained in pediatrics and internal medicine at Duke prior to training in adolescent and young adult medicine at Children’s Hospital, Boston. Dr Chung’s clinical and research interests include positive youth development, health care transitions and health behavior change. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a member of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.
Edward Curry, MD, FAAP
Dr Blythe earned her Bachelor of Science degree at the Indiana University Bloomington and her Medical Doctorate at the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM). She completed her residency in pediatrics at the Riley's Hospital for Children at Indiana University School of Medicine as well as her fellowship in adolescent medicine.
As professor of pediatrics and adjunct professor of gynecology at IUSM, she continues to provide care to teens in primary care clinics of Eskenazi Health Community Clinics and consultative care to teens at Riley’s Hospital for Children at Indiana University School of Medicine and IU Health. In these venues, she provides teaching to all types of learners including medical students, pediatric, obstetrics/gynecology and medicine-pediatric residents, as well as fellows in adolescent medicine.
Dr Curry was elected and served from 1999 to 2005 on the Executive Committee for the Section on Adolescent Health (SOAH), then served on the Committee on Adolescence (COA) for AAP from 2002 to 2007. She was Chair of COA from 2007 through June 2011. She was the Chair of the Committee on Adolescence for her state chapter from 2002 until June 2012.
Over the past few years, she has been recognized for her clinical accomplishments, receiving local and national awards, including the Indiana Torchbearer Award. Indiana’s Salute to Women (Indiana Commission of Women), Founder’s Community Award (AAP), Joe Mamlin Physician’s Recognition Award (IUMG-PC), Trustee Teaching Award (Indiana University School of Medicine), and the Virginia M Wagner MD Award (Indiana Chapter of AAP).
Her research interests include improving the delivery of preventive services to teens including reproductive health care, understanding barriers to such care for both practitioners and families, and developing algorithms of care for teens based on evidence based and best care practices.
Marian F Earls, MD, MTS, FAAP
Dr Earls is the director of Pediatric Programs for Community Care of North Carolina, and is the current lead on the state CHIPRA Quality Demonstration Grant for the state. From 1994 to July 2012, she was the medical director of Guilford Child Health., a large, nonprofit, private pediatric practice that was the pediatric division of Triad Adult and Pediatric Medicine in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is also a developmental and behavioral pediatrician. Guilford Child Health is a public-private partnership between two community health systems and the department of public health, and serves families at or below 200% of the federal poverty level. She is a clinical professor of pediatrics for the University of North Carolina Medical School.
Dr Earls also is medical director of the Neonatal Follow-up Clinic (multidisciplinary) for the Level III NICU at Women’s Hospital in Greensboro. She is a past president of the North Carolina Pediatric Society (President 2008–2010). She is chair of the Mental Health/School Health Committee for NCPS. She has been a member of the Committee on the Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health of the AAP, and was the lead author on the Committee’s Clinical Report, “Incorporating Recognition and Management of perinatal and postpartum Depression into Pediatric Practice.” She is a liaison from the AAP to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and is a member of the Executive Committee of the AAP’s Council on Early Childhood, and is a member of the Mental Health Leadership Work Group of the AAP that is charged with national dissemination of mental health integration in primary care pediatrics.
She was cochair of the North Carolina Institute of Medicine Task Force for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment in 2005, the NC IOM Task Force on Early Childhood Mental Health in 2012, and the NCIOM Task Force on Children’s Preventive Oral Health Services in 2013. Dr Earls was one of the Network Clinical Directors for Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC) since its inception by NC Medicaid in 1998 to 2012. In 2000, NC was one of the original states to have an ABCD (Assuring Better Child Health and Development) Project (funded by the Commonwealth Fund) and she is the clinical director of that project, which is now statewide. The purpose of ABCD has been to integrate developmental services (screening, surveillance, parent education) into pediatric practice. North Carolina State Medicaid Policy has now changed to be consistent with the process of developmental and behavioral screening implemented in this program and is requiring the use of validated, formal screens at EPSDT visits. The Commonwealth Fund had an ABCD II project in several new states, and Dr Earls did training and consulting for this initiative focused on early childhood mental health. She provided technical assistance to 5 states for implementation of developmental and behavioral screening and surveillance through her Setting the Stage for Success grant from the Commonwealth Fund in 2006–2007. She was faculty on the Healthy Development Learning Collaborative for pediatric practices in North Carolina and Vermont in 2004. From 2007 to 2010, she was the faculty chair for Early Developmental Screening and Intervention (EDSI) learning collaborative through UCLA. She was faculty for the AAP Bright Futures Preventive Services Improvement Project Learning Collaborative in 2011.
Dr Earls is currently a faculty member on a Breakthrough Series Collaborative, working with teams from 10 states on “Strengthening the Role of Primary Care for Families with Young Children Experiencing Trauma or Chronic Stress,” at Johns Hopkins and funded by a grant from SAMHSA.
Dr Earls received her AB in Biology in 1976 from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, her Master of Theological Studies (MTS) in 1978 from Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, and her MD from the University of Massachusetts in 1984. She completed her pediatric residency at Moses Cone Hospital (UNC AHEC) in Greensboro in 1987, and her fellowship in developmental and behavioral pediatrics in 1988. She is Board certified in both developmental and behavioral pediatrics and general pediatrics.
Francis E. Rushton, MD, FAAP
Dr Rushton has been the senior partner for 31 years at Beaufort Pediatrics, an 8-provider practice in coastal South Carolina. He is a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of South Carolina and currently serves as the medical director for South Carolina’s CHIPRA quality improvement project. His academic interests include community pediatrics, the support of optimal early brain development, psychosocial screening, group well-child visits, and integrated early childhood services. He authored the book, Family Support in Community Pediatrics: Confronting the Challenge, as well as other publications dealing with children's issues.
Dr Rushton has been tireless in his efforts on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He currently serves on the Board of Directors as District Chair for District IV. He has served on the National Nominating Committee and the Committee on Community Healthy Services (COCHS), and was chair of the Council on Community Pediatrics. Dr Rushton is a graduate of the University of Miami School of Medicine. His undergraduate work was at the University of Florida and Georgetown University. He did his pediatric training at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. He is a past president of the South Carolina Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He is married to Margaret, and has 3 children.
Deepa Sekhar, MD, MS, FAAP
Dr Sekhar is a general pediatrician at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, PA. She completed college and medical school at Brown University and then her pediatrics residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, NY in 2006. She completed a chief resident year at The Brooklyn Hospital in Brooklyn, NY, and then relocated to Dallas, TX working as a hospitalist at Children’s Medical Center. She has been at Penn State since 2008.
Her research interests involve examining the evidence base for pediatric screening tests conducted during well-child care. She explored the cost-effectiveness of screening urine dipsticks for the detection of chronic kidney disease in asymptomatic children. She is investigating improved screening and prevention of adolescent noise-induced hearing loss. Through K-12 funding via Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH), she is currently examining iron deficiency screening among adolescent females.
Dzung Vo, MD
Dr Vo earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his residency in pediatrics and Fellowship in adolescent medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr Vo is currently a clinical assistant professor in the Division of Adolescent Health and Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, at BC Children’s Hospital and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His main clinical and research areas of interest are in stress and health, resilience, and mindfulness-based interventions with youth. In partnership with Dr Jake Locke, Dr Vo codeveloped MARS-A (Mindful Awareness and Resilience Skills for Adolescents), an 8-week mindfulness training program for adolescents with depressive symptoms, with or without other co-occurring chronic illness or chronic pain. Dr Vo is also interested in health disparities, cultural competence, and the health of marginalized and vulnerable youth populations. In his role as a medical educator, Dr. Vo is the director of the Adolescent Medicine Subspecialty Residency (Fellowship) Program at BC Children’s Hospital, and also provides leadership in training of medical students and residents in adolescent health.
Reviewers
Paula Duncan, MD, FAAP
Barbara Frankowski, MD, MPH, FAAP
Tonya Chaffee, MD, MPH, FAAP
AAP Staff
Linda O’Brien
Kathy Janies
Jane Bassewitz, MA
Lori Morawski, MPH, CHES
Jonathan Falletti
Instructional Design
Becky Harris, CPT, CPLP, Instructional Designer, (Media Workshop)
EQIPP Planning Group
Gautham Suresh, MD, FAAP, Chair
Scott Carney, MD, FAAP
Danielle Casher, MD, MSHQ, FAAP
Karen Kamachi, MD, FAAP
William Southgate, MD, FAAP
Joyee Vachani, MD, FAAP
Original Course Authors: As a courtesy to our learners original course authors are listed below.
Duncan, Paula (MD, FAAP)
Baker, Sheila Rae (CPNP)
Blythe, Maggie (MD, FAAP)
Buerk, Ellen (MD,FAAP)
Driscoll, Amy (MD,FAAP)
Gee, Scott M (MD,FAAP)
Lazorick, Suzanne (MD, MPH, FAAP)
Macias, Michelle, (MD, FAAP)
Meurer, John, (MD, MBA, FAAP)
Sege, Robert (MD, PhD, FAAP)
Original Course AAP Staff:
Bassewitz, Jane (MA)
Lori Morawski (MPH, CHES)
Linda O’Brien
Pirretti, Amy (MS)
Levin-Goodman, Becky (MPH)
Steinberg-Hastings, Darcy (MPH)
O’Brill, Tamiko
Original Course Instructional Designer:
Cathy Schmitt, RN, MA, EdD (ABD) (Consultant)
AAP Support
The mission of the Quality Improvement Innovation Network (QuIIN), a network of practicing pediatricians and their staff, is to improve care and outcomes for children and families. QuIIN does so by using quality improvement science to test practical tools, measures, and strategies for use in everyday pediatric practice and the child's medical home, as well as by informal assessment that provides practicing pediatrician perspective into evidenced-based recommendations and tools for implementation.
The measures and data collection tools presented in this course were tested by the Quality Improvement Innovation Network. Comments and feedback were incorporated.