What Colleen Kraft, MD, is expecting from the 2023 Pediatric Academic Societies meeting

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

Hi, and thank you so much for joining us. I'm Joshua Fitch with Contemporary Pediatrics®.

Colleen Kraft, MD, MBA, FAAP:

And I'm Dr. Colleen Kraft. I am a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine, and I work at the Children's Hospital, Los Angeles.

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

Dr. Kraft, thank you for taking the time to join us today. So you'll be attending the annual Pediatric Academic Society's (PAS) conference, which begins April 27, and runs through May 1 in Washington DC, first of all, are you presenting at the conference? If so, what will you be discussing?

Kraft:

I will be presenting a poster looking at the efficacy of an artificially intelligent intelligence driven device in understanding development children, ages 18 months to 72 months who present with developmental delay. And what's exciting about this is that this device has been FDA authorized, but we're using this in a group of primary care pediatricians, how does it do in the real world? And the device really helped us better understand many children. And for some helped us with the diagnosis of autism.

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

What do you think those attending that presentation... What will they gain the most?

Kraft:

So the poster presentations, there are many posters, and you can walk around and see a lot of the research that's out there. This will just give people a sense of really where the whole buzz of this conference is going this year, which is how do we take care of so many kids who have so many developmental behavioral issues when we have a limited number of specialists?

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

Dr. Kraft with that being said, what are some of the other sessions you look forward to attending aside from the one you're presenting yourself?

Kraft:

Apart from the poster sessions, where you get to see some very cutting edge research, I'm really looking at some of the educational sessions that will help with the understanding of the development of the capacity to take care of kids with behavioral health disorders, with anxiety with depression, with attention problems with learning problems at school. And then with developmental disabilities, such as speech language delays, or autism. What we know is that our the way we've practiced has been, we've sent these kids to specialists. And that's resulted in really long lines to get kids diagnosed and treated. And with some of these new programs that have been researched and studied, we now know that we can all share in the care of these children, and we can develop the capacity so that we can help to address the mental health crisis in kids.

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

Certainly, that was going to be one of my next questions is addressing mental health. Obviously, that will be a big topic at the conference. How important is it, like you just mentioned the collaboration across healthcare specialists, how important is it to be in kind of one room and really engage with these other specialists?

Kraft:

It's absolutely essential to the care of children, particularly for something like behavioral health, because many of us in training did not learn about mental health, behavioral health, developmental disabilities. And what we were taught was that you screen for them, but then you refer to a specialist, there are not enough specialists out there. So primary care has to take that on in terms of the capacity and understanding the basics, but then having somebody else that you can turn to for additional education, or additional collaboration is only going to result in better care for children.

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

And is that something that simply will just take time as this realization, lack of specialists that you referenced kind of sets in almost?

Kraft:

You know, it takes time, but it also takes political will and funding. So there are many programs that put together child and adolescent psychiatrists and therapists and make them available to primary care physicians through the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Access Program, and many states have these, but there has to be dedicated funding to this. There's got to be funding for the specialist time for the curriculum for teaching folks, and then for the ability for people to connect when it comes to the care and the management of that individual patient in your office.

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

Thank you, Dr. Kraft. I know you mentioned pediatric mental health, what other buzz items or newsworthy items are you really expecting to see at the conference that several health care providers might be chatting about?

Kraft:

There will be a lot of discussion about health equity, and in recent years, the whole topic of racism and health equity, which are really two ends of a different spectrum, and how do we achieve health equity is going to be part of what we're going to see. One of the The thing that is important to know is that for children 53% of the kids in our country have Medicaid as their insurance. That means 53% of kids in our country are living at or below the poverty level that's really despicable for a nation like the United States. And how do we achieve health equity? When we know that most of our kids are living in poverty?

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

Dr. Kraft with a statistic like that you have to expect that's going to be addressed that PAS you know, what are you hoping you hear in this regard? And what do you think health care providers are going to take away?

Kraft:

I think much of the research and the presentations in this space are going to look at how we use public funding to take care of kids and their basic needs. It's going to address some of the things that we see as part of this disparity. So gun violence, we tend to see more gun violence in families who have fewer resources. How do we address that? How about food insecurity? How about reproductive justice? These are all topics that we're going to see at PAS that are really going to help to this to address some of the disparities that we see.

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

Just in a general sense Dr. Kraft, what is something a health care provider perhaps a first time PAS attender can take away from a conference like this with so many people in the same space, so many topics?

Kraft:

If you're a first time attendee at PAS, look at the areas that you're interested in. What PAS does is it actually brings the researchers together the people who have studied some of these issues and have studied some of the of the the ways to address these issues. And you can find some answers, you can find some new programs or some new technology that may actually be right there for you to help address that health disparity with the kids in your population in your office.

Contemporary Pediatrics®:

Dr. Kraft, is there anything else you'd like to add about the upcoming conference or what you're most looking forward to?

Kraft:

One of the things that I'm always looking forward to at PAS is meeting with my colleagues whose literature and articles I've read about throughout the last year. You know, now that we're meeting back face to face again, it's great to see what's going on in your world. What are you seeing at your institution? What are your residents experiencing? You begin to brainstorm solutions you begin to really just take advantage of the camaraderie of your associates and other pediatricians in this country.