Clinical Research Directory

Quasi-Randomized Evaluation of the UCLA Next Day Clinic (NDC)

The Next Day Clinic (NDC) is a quality improvement initiative that will be launched and operated by UCLA Health starting July 22, 2024. Its goals are to improve patient care and safety and to maximize cost effectiveness. The way it does this is by identifying patients in the ED who would normally be admitted for low-acuity conditions, and diverting them to a high-acuity clinic the following day called the NDC. This will help decompress the ED and the hospital, and allow for overall higher quality care. The Health System has partnered with UCLA's Healthcare Value Analytics and Solutions \[UVAS\] group which specializes in these types of program evaluations. The analysis conducted by the study team will be used to directly inform NDC operations, scaling, and future plans.

Population Pharmacokinetics of Temocillin in Acute Enterobacterial Pyelonephritis in Children

Temocillin, a 6-alpha-methoxypenicillin derivative of ticarcillin, is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic, primarily restricted to Enterobacterales. Therefore, its prescription for the treatment of febrile urinary tract infections requiring hospitalization in pediatrics appears interesting. However, and despite marketing authorization in pediatrics for the treatment of complicated urinary tract infections (including acute pyelonephritis), the pharmacokinetic parameters of this antibiotic have not been specifically evaluated in pediatrics, and the optimal dose is not known in this population. Through this study, we propose to determine the pharmacokinetic parameters of temocillin in children aged 0-15 years with a febrile urinary tract infection due to Gram-negative rod (GNR), without sepsis but requiring hospitalization. The results will help to establish dose recommendations for temocillin in the pediatric population, based on age and renal function.

The Validity of the Quick Renal MRI in Pediatric Kidney Disease

The investigators propose a new imaging method for children born with congenital anomalies of the urinary tract that is a rapid, injection-, sedation-, and radiation-free alternative: the quick renal MRI. This proposal hypothesizes that the quick renal MRI has high validity compared to current radiologic standard for renal infection and scarring, the 99mTechnetium-dimercaptosuccinic acid (99mTc- DMSA) renal scan in the detection of acute renal infections and scars. If the quick renal MRI is accurate, it could potentially replace the DMSA scan for those specific questions and ease the burden of testing for children with chronic renal disease. Findings from these studies will provide preliminary data and rationale for a multi-centered study to further test this new technology. Participants will be 0-21 years of age and can expect to be on study for from 1 week (if enrolled in Aim 1) to 6 months (if enrolled in Aim 2).