Prashant Mahajan, MD, MPH, MBA

Dr. Mahajan is certified in pediatrics and pediatric emergency medicine. In addition, he has a Master's in Public Health (Health Administration and Policy) and a Master's in Business Administration. He is currently the Chair, Section of Emergency Medicine, for the American Academy of Pediatrics. His research interests are in infection/inflammation and in the area of clinician diagnostic decision making. He has been serially funded by NIH for the evaluation of the febrile infant with the use of novel RNA expression analysis using microarrays to define bacterial and non-bacterial biosignatures. He is involved in patient safety and quality and is funded by AHRQ on the study of diagnostic errors in the pediatric emergency setting.

My research has focused on enhancing decision making in austere circumstances such as emergency care delivery. To that end, I have co-led the first nationwide study of host immune response via transcriptomic analysis to distinguish bacterial vs. viral etiologies of fever in febrile infants in the first two months of life. I have helped develop highly precise and clinically meaningful prediction rules in the evaluation and management of young febrile infants. My second area of focus has been reduction of patient harm from the perspective of diagnostic quality in the context of emergency care. I have modified the National Academies framework on diagnostic safety for emergency care, for the first time, defined multiple electronic triggers for epidemiology and contributory factors of diagnostic errors, used artificial intelligence, including machine learning and natural language processing to investigate large datasets for diagnostic errors and finally developed the first protocol to perform ethnographic analysis of the process of diagnostic decision making in naturalistic settings. Finally, I use advanced technology such as mixed and augmented reality to enhance clinician decision making in real-time in remote settings. These endeavors have been industry funded and we have developed the first ambient intelligence module for pediatric resuscitation through the REACT Program (Research and Education in Acute Care using Advanced Technology).