Assistant Professor of Pediatric/Cardiac intensive Care
Emory University School of Medicine/Children's Health Care of Atlanta
Alaa Aljiffry,MD,Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Children's Heath Care of Atlanta/Emory University School of Medicine.
During my time as a pediatric critical fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin (CHW), I received comprehensive training in the care of children with congenital and acquired cardiac disease.While rotating in the 24-bed cardiac intensive care unit at CHW.During that time, I pursued research focusing on sepsis and near infra-red spectroscopy in pediatrics.
Then as a fourth-year pediatric cardiac intensive care fellow at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, I spent a year in a 36-bed CICU where I focused on the care of cardiac patients and learned some basics of electrophysiology and echocardiography.During that time,it became clear to me that I needed to broaden my understanding of pediatric cardiology and congenital heart disease to be better equipped to care for the cardiac patients.
Therefore, i completed pediatric cardiology fellowship there and was able to integrate this new knowledge into the care of cardiac patients.My cardiology fellowship, provided me with a unique opportunity to work with a large pediatric transplant and heart failure population, which helped me to pursue two research projects.The first one as a co-author, how INTERMACS score predict patient outcomes post-transplant when assigned to pediatric patients at the time of listing and at transplant.The second project, comparing the resource utilization of transplant for single ventricle patients compared to biventricular patients over different eras.
I joined Emory/ CHOA as faculty of pediatrics in the department of cardiology and worked since then in Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care. Since then, I realized that in pediatric CICU we have significant amount of data that we don’t always utilize and could be easily categorized and put to algorithms to help fast recognition of patients’ status change.I Pursued clinical research and data based research.