Expanding digital health solutions for children
When cancer strikes children, it takes an emotional and physical toll, while also creating many logistical challenges for patients and families. Senior Nora Buell witnessed some of the challenges facing pediatric cancer patients when she completed her Jepson School of Leadership Studies internship with the Child Life Program of New York City’s renowned Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center last summer.
Buell, a leadership studies and chemistry major, saw how prolonged hospital stays, for example, make it difficult for children to keep up in school. She saw how treatments administered through infusion backpacks or intravenous poles inhibit pediatric patients’ ability to play freely.
“While planning fun activities for the kids during my internship, I heard a lot from families about their struggles,” she said. “When one child’s hospital stay was extended, her mother had to reschedule the child’s appointment with a specialist that she had waited months to get. I began to wonder how we could apply digital health, which incorporates technology into the health care space, to address some of these challenges. If we used telehealth more, could we reduce the amount of school a child has to miss? Could we develop a digital health solution to minimize the cumbersome delivery of transfusions?”
Buell will soon learn more about how digital health can improve the health system. Recently named a Jepson Scholar, she will receive an all-expenses-paid scholarship to pursue a Master of Science in Applied Digital Health at the University of Oxford this fall.
“The program will provide me with an overview of digital health — which includes everything from Apple watches, to diabetes pumps, to data acquisition systems, to medicine-tracking apps, and on and on,” she said. “The two big topics in the field right now are telehealth and artificial intelligence.”
Buell said she is particularly interested in exploring pediatric digital health, because she enjoys interacting with children. In addition to working with children during her Memorial Sloan Kettering internship, she serves as a youth tennis instructor and a substitute elementary teacher in Duxbury, Massachusetts, her hometown, during her college breaks.
Her plans for a future career in pediatric digital health will marry her two majors, the Science Leadership Scholar said. In Dr. Kelling Donald’s chemistry lab, she works with chemistry, biology, and mathematics students researching bonding patterns in small phase clusters found at the midpoint between a molecule and a solid. Although she enjoys the research and anticipates her chemistry background will benefit her in the health care field, she said she wants a career focused on human connections rather than scientific research.
This is where her leadership studies major comes in. “I am especially interested in the social science aspect of leadership studies, how you work with people to make effective change,” she said. “The Jepson School has helped me keep in touch with empathy, which is important when working in health care, especially with kids.
“Ethical Decision Making in Health Care, taught by Dr. Jessica Flanigan, has been one of my favorite classes at University of Richmond. We discuss everything from the ethics of genetic enhancement on embryo selection for in vitro fertilization treatments, to do-not-resuscitate orders in pediatrics, to the paternalism that occurs when doctors tell patients and families what to do. Often I walk into class thinking one thing about an issue and walk out not sure.”
Buell said she will continue weighing ethical issues in her Oxford master’s program, likely in the context of how and when to apply new technologies in health care.
“Pediatrics is underrepresented in digital health innovations,” she said. “I want to advocate for children in the digital health space.”