Barbara-Jo Achuff, MD, FAAP

As an attending in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, my overarching career goal is to improve early and late outcomes for children with cardiac disease with a primary focus on optimization of sedation and pain management practices during the patient’s intensive care unit stay. During my advanced training, fellowship, and as attending in the CICU, I work with a team that measures applied medication and treatment options and their effect on early outcomes after cardiac surgery.  

Clinical Interests: 

In my current leadership roles for a multi-disciplinary sedation stewardship team, I have developed an expanding, daily refreshed database including all medications administered to our ICU patients. Through novel data discovery, pattern recognition and visualizations of large amount of data over time, we have developed recommended age-based analgesia/sedation pathways and metrics to sustain those pathways for patients in the CICU. With current, accurate and timely clinical reports and dash boarding, our team continues to lead scientific processes and analytics leveraging data for quality improvement and excellent care at the bedside for the most fragile patients in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit.   

Research Interests: 

My research on medication choices and the effect on post-operative mechanical ventilation reveals that meticulous post-operatively pain and sedation management allows less opioid exposure and early liberation from mechanical ventilator support after cardiac surgery, even for the youngest patients.  My more recent publications include a novel approach to analyze high fidelity hemodynamic data including millions of beat-to-beat systolic blood pressure measurements surrounding recorded medication administration in our pediatric CICU. This work showed that the basic mathematical tools for approximating such systems have sufficient accuracy for describing complex non-linear behaviors. The development of algorithms around therapies such as medication doses or other interventions in the ICU using expert systems allows the analysis of time-series data and can observe changes in physiologic data around doses. This provides insight to clinicians who can be prepared to intervene and act accordingly improving outcomes for these critically ill children.