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Seminar: Symptomatic Deep Venous Thrombosis Associated with Peripherally Inserted Central Catheters


Seminar Presentation

R. Scott Evans


Location: HSEB 4100B
Date: Feb. 2, 2012
Time: 4:15 pm


Abstract

Peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs) are considered a safe method to provide long-term antibiotic therapy, chemotherapy and nutrition support. The use of PICCs has increased during the past 10 years. Deep venous thrombosis (DVT) is a complication that requires early PICC removal, may extend hospitalization and can result in pulmonary embolism.  PICC insertion teams strive to understand risk factors and develop methods to prevent DVTs.  This presentation will cover 6+ years of work to use Biomedical Informatics to detect, analyze and prevent DVT associated with PICCs.


Bio

R. Scott Evans is a Medical Informatics Director in the department of Medical Informatics at Intermountain Healthcare and a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.  Dr. Evans received his BS degree in Zoology and MS degree in Microbiology/Parasitology from Brigham Young University.  He received his PhD in Medical Biophysics & Computing from the University of Utah. He is a member of the American Medical Informatics Association and is a Fellow in the American College of Medical Informatics.  He is on the AMIA Board of Directors, the Editorial Boards of the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association and the Annals of Pharmacotherapy and was on the Institute of Medicine's committee for the "Identification and Prevention of Medication Errors."  He was Treasurer on the Executive Committee of the American Medical Informatics Association Board of Directors from 2010-1011 and Chair of the Scientific Program Committee for the AMIA 2011 annual meeting. He was vice chair of applications for the AMIA 2008 annual meeting and has severed on a number of previous AMIA scientific program committees. In 1992 he won the "Best Paper Award" at the annual American Medical Informatics Association meeting.  In 1993 he received the "Priscilla M. Mayden Award" for outstanding contribution in the field of Medical Informatics and in 1997 received the "Oslers Cloak" award for excellence in caring and curing from Intermountain Health Care.  He received the "Distinguished Poster Award" in 2005 from the American Medical Informatics Association.  In 2010, his paper "Enhanced Notification of Infusion Pump Programming Errors" was nominated for the Best Paper Award at the MedInfo international meeting in South Africa.  In 2011, he was awarded the Investigator of the Year Award from Intermountain Healthcare and the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics by the American Medical Informatics Association.

His major experience and interests have been in the design, development, implementation and evaluation of computerized decision support tools for the selection and management of anti-infective agents, computer methods to identify and reduce adverse drug events, adverse medical device events and venous thrombolytic events, computerized methods to identify patients needing isolation, and computerized methods to identify and reduce hospital-acquired infections and report notifiable diseases.  A number of these computerized tools are clinically operational at all 22 hospitals at Intermountain Healthcare. He is on a number of enterprise-wide patient safety-related committees and clinical programs at Intermountain Healthcare.  He also serves on a number of graduate student committees, teaches Clinical Research and Decision Support in the Biomedical Informatics department and lectures on Computerized Decision Support to the first year medical students at the University of Utah.  He is a reviewer for a number of medical informatics, clinical and patient safety journals and has published over 100 articles, most on topics involving Medical Informatics, in peer reviewed journals from the Medical Informatics literature and a number of clinical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and CHEST.