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INFORMATION FOR

Fuad Abujarad, PhD, MSc

Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine

Research Summary

Dr. Abujarad’s primary research area is in digital health. Currently, Dr. Abujarad is utilizing Digital Health to improve patient health outcomes while decreasing costs and unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency department visits. His specific research interests focus on the area of Digital Health, Gerontechnology, Elder Mistreatment, Informed Consent, and systems that provide real-time background searches. His overarching aim is to apply his in-depth knowledge and methodological expertise to address major health disparities in the older adult population by developing technologies that optimize the human interface of complex systems.

Currently, his research is focused on developing and testing elder mistreatment screening and identifications tools as well as a web-based patient-centered virtual multimedia interactive informed consent tool to enhance the quality of care and patient safety. This research was recently funded by AHRQ, CMS, and NIH.


Specialized Terms: Gerontechnology, Elder Mistreatment, Digital Informed Consent, Digital Health, Digital Background Checks.


Extensive Research Description

Dr. Abujarad is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) on the "Virtual cOaching in making Informed Choices on Elder Mistreatment Self-Disclosure" (VOICES) project funded by NIA/NIH. He is also the PI on the grants “Patient Centered Virtual Multimedia Interactive Informed Consent (VIC)” funded by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), “Health Information Technology to Prevent Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation” and the “Michigan Workforce Background Check-Enhancement Project” from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). He is also a Co-Investigator grant for Testing of a Community Complex Care Response Team to Improve Geriatric Public Health Outcomes fund by RWJF. Also, he is a Co-Investigator on the grants “Automated Bilingual Computerized Alcohol Screening & Intervention in Latinos” from National Institutes of Health (NIH), and “Clinical Decision Support for Mild Traumatic Brain Injury” from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ). He also serves as co-investigator on an R01 funded randomized control trial in the Yale Emergency Department. The tool will be used to reduce emergency department recidivism and to determine the impact of HIT in a high volume emergency department.

On the “Patient Centered Virtual Multimedia Interactive Informed Consent (VIC)” project, Dr. Abujarad leads this AHRQ-funded study to develop a digital health tool to enhance the traditional informed consent process by presenting the informed consent to patients and clearly explaining the purpose, process, risks, benefits and alternatives to medical procedures. VIC was successfully evaluated in a research study to demonstrate that it can facilitate the study of complex interventions in real-world settings, and will be explored in future research opportunities.

To this end, Dr. Abujarad has successfully secured a grant on the very important topic of patient safety and quality of care. He is the Principal Investigator on the Michigan Workforce Background Check – Enhancement grant from Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded for utilizing the web-based applications to better protect patients receiving long-term care. The system he is currently developing will save time and money for health care facilities and will vet healthcare worker backgrounds to better protect patients. A similar system he designed for a Department of Health and Human Service pilot study continues to be used for five years after the end of the study. This project has been named the national model for best design practices for a comprehensive background checks to protect vulnerable adults receiving long-term care services.

Dr. Abujarad's work focuses on both the theoretical aspects of the software development as well as on building patient-centered tools. His work has been motivated by an important observation in distributed computing called fault-tolerance. Moreover, as part of software engineering, it is often necessary to modify a program to add fault-tolerance to faults that were not considered in the original design. With this understanding, he developed new algorithms for automated synthesis in addition to parallelizing existing algorithms. He has done a significant advance in the field of automated synthesis. He co-authored a book chapter titled Stabilizing Interference-Free Slot Assignment for Wireless Mesh Networks in Guide to Wireless Mesh Networks. He has published and presented widely in the top engineering journals on automated model revision topics.

He published and presented widely on human-computer interaction and automated model revision topics. He was the principal investigator on a federally funded research project that applied engineering principles to improve the safe administration of opioids in patient-controlled analgesia in both inpatient and home-based primary care settings. Also, he was the Yale-PI on the development of the Delaware Background Check System for the Delaware Health and Social Services Department, the Criminal History System (CHS) for the Washington State Department of Social & Health Services, and the State Of Maine Department of Health and Human Services to develop the Maine Background Check Program (MEBCP).

Coauthors

Research Interests

Medical Informatics; Mobile Health Units; Quality of Health Care; Software Design; Public Health Informatics; Patient Safety

Public Health Interests

Aging; Behavioral Health; Bioinformatics; Clinical Trials; Ethics; Health Care Management

Research Images

Selected Publications

  • Development and validation of the Emergency Department Geriatric Readmission Assessment at Yale (ED GRAY): Part 1Post, L. A., Conner, T. L., Oehmke, J. F. Abujarad, F., Cooney, L. M., Brandt, C., Page, C., Swierenga, S. J., Biroscak, B. J., Esposito, C., & Dziura, J. (2016). Development and validation of the Emergency Department Geriatric Readmission Assessment at Yale (ED GRAY): Part 1, fundamental measurement. British Journal of Medicine and Medical Research, 14(1), 1-14
  • Development and validation of the Emergency Department Geriatric Readmission Assessment at Yale (ED GRAY): Part 21. Post, L. A., Conner, T. L., Oehmke, J. F. Abujarad, F., Cooney, L. M., Brandt, C., Page, C., Swierenga, S. J., Biroscak, B. J., Esposito, C., & Dziura, J. (2016). Development and validation of the Emergency Department Geriatric Readmission Assessment at Yale (ED GRAY): Part 2, prognostic accuracy. British Journal of Medicine and Medical Research, 14(1), 1-8.
  • mHealth as a Means to Address Health Disparities in Alcohol Use Disorders Among Spanish Speaking Latino ED Patients.Abujarad, F, Vaca, F, mHealth as a Means to Address Health Disparities in Alcohol Use Disorders Among Spanish Speaking Latino ED Patients. Poster Presentation, The New England Regional SAEM conference, Boston, MA. 2015
  • The Impact of Usability on Patient Safety in Long-Term CareAbujarad, F, Swierenga, S J, Dennis, T A, & Post, L A. The Impact of Usability on Patient Safety in Long-Term Care. Strategic Social Media and Usability, 2nd International Conference on HCI in Business. Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2015. 221-231.
  • The complexity of automated addition of fault-tolerance without explicit legitimate states.Abujarad F, Lin Y, Bonakdarpour B, Kulkarni SS. The complexity of automated addition of fault-tolerance without explicit legitimate states. Springer journal of Distributed Computing (DC), 2014-8: 1-19
  • Real-Time Screening to Improve Patient Safety in Long-term Care.Abujarad, F Swierenga, S J, Dennis, T A, & Post, L A. Real-Time Screening to Improve Patient Safety in Long-term Care. Poster Presentation, The International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care: Improving the Outcomes, Chicago, IL. 2014
  • Management of On-Line Registries Information for Patient Safety in Long-Term Care.Abujarad F, Swierenga S, Dennis T, Post L. Management of On-Line Registries Information for Patient Safety in Long-Term Care. Human Interface and the Management of Information. Information and Knowledge in Applications and Services. Vol 8522: Springer International Publishing; 2014:307-316.
  • Towards scalable model checking of self-stabilizing programs.1. Chen J, Abujarad F, Kulkarni SS. Towards scalable model checking of self-stabilizing programs. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. 2013; 73(4): 400-410.
  • Improving Patient Safety Through User-Centered Healthcare Background Check System Design.Swierenga, S J, Abujarad, F, Dennis, T A, & Post, L A. Improving Patient Safety Through User-Centered Healthcare Background Check System Design. Poster presentation at the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society Healthcare IT Symposium. Baltimore, MD. 2013
  • ap backs: Continuous workforce monitoring to improve patient safety in long-term careAbujarad, F, Swierenga, S J, Dennis, T A, and Post, L A. Rap backs: Continuous workforce monitoring to improve patient safety in long-term care. In Marcus, A. (ed.), Design, User Experience and Usability, HCII 2013, Part III, LNCS 8014, pp. 3-9. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.
  • Symbolic Synthesis of Masking Fault-tolerant Distributed Programs.Bonakdarpour B, Kulkarni SS, and Abujarad F. Symbolic Synthesis of Masking Fault-tolerant Distributed Programs. Springer Journal of Distributed Computing. 2012; 25(1): 83-108.
  • Automated Constraint-Based Addition of Nonmasking and Stabilizing Fault-ToleranceAbujarad F and Kulkarni SS. Automated Constraint-Based Addition of Nonmasking and Stabilizing Fault-Tolerance. Journal of Theoretical Computer Science. 2011; 412(33): 4228-4246.
  • Real-world user-centered design: The Michigan Workforce Background Check system.Swierenga, S J, Abujarad, F, Dennis, T A, & Post, L A. Real-world user-centered design: The Michigan Workforce Background Check system. In Salvendy, G., and Smith, M. J. (eds.): Human Interface, Part II, HCII 2011, LNCS 6772, 325-334.
  • Complexity Issues in Automated Model Revision Without Explicit Legitimate StateFuad Abujarad, and Sandeep S. Kulkarni. Complexity Issues in Automated Model Revision Without Explicit Legitimate State. International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS), LNCS 6366, pp. 206-220, September-2010.
  • Effect of Fairness in Model Checking of Self-stabilizing ProgramsJingshu Chen, Fuad Abujarad, Sandeep S. Kulkarni. Effect of Fairness in Model Checking of Self-stabilizing Programs. International Conference On Principles Of Distributed Systems (OPODIS) .p.p. 135-138, December-2010.
  • Stabilizing Interference-Free Slot Assignment for Wireless Mesh NetworksReviewed Book Chapters: M. Arumugam, A. Jhumka, F. Abujarad, and S. S. Kulkarni. Stabilizing Interference-Free Slot Assignment for Wireless Mesh Networks. In Guide to Wireless Mesh Networks, Springer, Editors: Sudip Misra, Subhas Chandra Misra, and Isaac Woungang, ISBN: 978-1-84800-908-0, 2009. (http://www.springer.com/computer/communications/book/978-1-84800-908-0)
  • Multicore Constraint-Based Automated StabilizationFuad Abujarad, and Sandeep S. Kulkarni. Multicore Constraint-Based Automated Stabilization. The 11th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS), LNCS 5873, pp.47-61, November-2009.
  • Weakest Invariant Generation for Automated Addition of Fault-ToleranceFuad Abujarad, and Sandeep S. Kulkarni. Weakest Invariant Generation for Automated Addition of Fault-Tolerance. Workshop on Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT), ENTCS 258, pp. 3-15, August-2009.
  • Constraint Based Automated Synthesis of Nonmasking and Stabilizing Fault-ToleranceFuad Abujarad, and Sandeep S. Kulkarni. Constraint Based Automated Synthesis of Nonmasking and Stabilizing Fault-Tolerance. 28th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), pp. 119-128, September-2009.
  • Weakest Invariant Generation for Automated Addition of Fault-ToleranceFuad Abujarad, and Sandeep S. Kulkarni. Weakest Invariant Generation for Automated Addition of Fault-Tolerance. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS). 5873, pp.3-15, December-2009
  • Parallelizing Deadlock Resolution in Symbolic Synthesis of Distributed Programs.Fuad Abujarad, Borzoo Bonakdarpour, and Sandeep S. Kulkarni. Parallelizing Deadlock Resolution in Symbolic Synthesis of Distributed Programs. International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Methods in verifiCation (PDMC), pp. 92-106. November -2009.
  • Automated Addition of Fault-Tolerance to SCR Toolset: A case studyFuad Abujarad, and Sandeep S. Kulkarni. Automated Addition of Fault-Tolerance to SCR Toolset: A case study. The Seventh International Workshop on Assurance in Distributed Systems and Networks (ADSN), in ICDCSW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 The 28th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops,17-20, pp.539 – 544, June-2008.
  • istributed Synthesis of Fault-Tolerant Programs in the High Atomicity ModelBorzoo Bonakdarpour, Sandeep S. Kulkarni, and Fuad Abujarad. Distributed Synthesis of Fault-Tolerant Programs in the High Atomicity Model. International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS), LNCS 4838, pp.21-36,November 2007.
  • Distributed Synthesis of Fault-ToleranceBorzoo Bonakdarpour, Sandeep S. Kulkarni, and Fuad Abujarad. Distributed Synthesis of Fault-Tolerance. International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS), LNCS 4280, pp. 566-567, November 2006.