Meet Dr. Sandy Burnham!
Getting to the “why”.
Dr. Sandy Burnham, from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), is a well-known name in the PR-COIN community. He grew up outside of New York city, and after college at Dartmouth, moved to Philadelphia and has been there since. He met his wife in medical school and they have two daughters, one now in college and one in high school.
Dr. Burnham’s PR-COIN story actually goes back to when he was Dr. Esi Morgan’s senior resident at CHOP. The implementation of Treat-to-Target (T2T), that is the guiding work of PR-COIN, emerged during his sabbatical in 2014. Dr. Burnham took the core concepts of the Intermountain Health Quality Improvement Advancement Course he was taking at the time - measure, standardize, and use clinical decision support – and took them to apply T2T at CHOP. He chose it as his sabbatical focus as it aligned with “a lot of things PR-COIN is about, including data driven and outcomes focused”.
The research into T2T began in 2004 because not enough patients were achieving inactive disease, and studies showed that in a pre-biologic era, biologic outcomes could be achieved. Unfortunately, there was no map to implement from a Quality Improvement (QI) standpoint and the question remained, how would it look in the clinic?
CHOP became a laboratory of sorts and T2T became the first major PR-COIN project. Dr. Burnham is working on similar methods in the lupus population. He’s seen over time that patient visits are different because of the built-in methods to assess patient and parent voices with patient-reported outcomes.
“When patients don’t have good outcomes, T2T focuses on the ‘why’.”, Dr. Burnham says. “Sometimes it focuses the discussion between my patient and I on a low level of disease activity that would not have been clinically detectable without a systematic approach, especially using patient-reported outcomes.”
He says T2T is a great model for JIA treatment, and a great foundation for the treatment of arthritis, that is usable by any provider. While the work is hard, the partnership with families gives him a sense of purpose, seeing that they care even more about improvement.
“It makes me want to go on. You need that sense of purpose to keep going.”
He says PR-COIN really helped him focus his career on QI and healthcare delivery. “It has really served as an incredible motivator for me to think of ways to improve my own practice and really be there for my own patients and their families in a measurable way.”
Dr. Burnham is also engaged and passionate about PR-COIN’s growing focus on healthcare disparities. Research shared in the last learning session showed clinical decision support attenuated disparities between Black patients and other patients.
“This gives me hope that if we dig into these differences and standardize care in a way that’s meaningful, then we have a chance to narrow the gaps.”
When he’s not in the clinic and working on T2T or PR-COIN, Dr. Burnham loves sports and being outside, playing squash and tennis, and learning to fly fish. He also enjoys photography.
Visit our Get Involved page to learn more about how you and your center can get involved in PR-COIN.