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Well what inspired me to take part in the PCORnet study is I've been a teacher
for 24 years, I work with special education students and during that time
I've always tried to do the best that I could to support my students and allow
them the opportunity to have the most fulfilling and rewarding life that they
can by reaching their full potential.
I also am the father of an 18 year old son who has combatted childhood obesity
most of his life. I've raised him for the last 4 years on my own.
Having worked with him so closely it's been really important to me to see just what kind of
progress that we can make towards limiting or hopefully eliminating
obesity for others and my son as well.
My role in the antibiotic study is I'm the
parent primary investigator for the study. What my primary job is to
oversee engagement in the study and that is working with parents and
patients, pediatricians, and other health care providers, health care systems in
organizational leaders, and community and advocacy groups.
As a layperson you hear
all the time in the news about systems getting hacked into, people's private
information getting taken you know away from them, their identities being stolen and so
when you talk about that in terms of health care and your health records
naturally people are going to be very concerned about the safety and security
of whatever it is that's being shared. One of the ways that we've tried to
overcome that in our study is instead of taking individual data we tried to
aggregate it and put it all together so that it's anonymous and that also allows
us to take a look at vast amounts of information rather than just looking at individual
although we will be doing some of that too, just not with anybody's
names attached to it. So by doing so, we have the opportunity to really take a
look at major trends that are going on in terms of antibiotics being given to
kids ages 0 to 2 and the possible effects of increase in childhood obesity
later on in life. Without doing that, we really wouldn't be able to determine
whether or not there was an identifiable risk and the level of extent to
which that risk exists. If we couldn't do that then we wouldn't be
able to inform patients and parents in the future as to what those risks are
and give them more information so that they can make more informed decisions
about whether or not to use antibiotics in a particular case.
The more we as people interact with our medical community and the more that they
interact with us it eliminates a lot of the intimidation
and really leads to better care treatment for everybody.