I am Kristen, the pediatric neurologist leading the program. Here is a little more about my story…
I'm originally from Montana and North Dakota and am a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. I grew up receiving health care through the Trenton Indian Health Service. With all the fun I had growing up in small towns, I also had many childhood play-related visits to the emergency room/urgent care at CHI St. Alexius Health in Williston, ND. I have a deep connection to the region and the clinicians practicing there.
One of my favorite parts of medicine is that you keep learning by doing, and that process is so much better when you have subspecialty colleagues who enjoy teaching and thinking through cases together. I started Doctor2Doctor to make that kind of collaborative learning more accessible.
In addition to my work with Doctor2Doctor, I am an Associate Physician in Child Neurology and Medical Genetics at UC San Diego Rady Children's Hospital and a K12 Research Scholar at the Scripps Research Translational Institute. I earned my Medical Degree with Honors in Research from Weill Cornell Medicine, was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha Honors Society, and received the UC San Diego Department of Pediatrics' Clinical Science Award.
My work focuses on strengthening rural health through three areas:
Aims to increase the capacity of rural healthcare clinicians by providing ongoing learning opportunities. Learning happens by doing as clinicians ask questions about the patients they are seeing and receive advice from specialists.
Aims to extend the capacity of clinicians through thoughtfully designed digital tools. We currently have two tools in development. One collects pre-visit information from patients and summarizes it for clinicians to review before appointments. The second collects information from patients taking antiseizure medications, summarizes it, and provides drafted recommendations and responses for clinicians to review.
Aims to make clinical trials investigating epilepsy treatments more accessible to patients and families by being fully remote by design. This includes a clinical trial testing glycerol phenylbutyrate for SLC6A1-related disorders, a rare genetic cause of epilepsy. You can read our recent study evaluating the use of phenylbutyrate for rare epilepsies here.
Thank you for taking the time to learn about our program.
–Kristen