Clinical Services
Infectious Diseases Outpatient Clinic
The ID Outpatient Clinic, based at the Children’s Hospital Colorado, provides care for a full range of conditions related to infectious diseases.
The Outpatient ID team and its individual providers has received several awards, including the 2018 Patient-Family Experience Five Star Excellence Award.
Patients are referred to the clinic from throughout Colorado and the surrounding states. Patients departing the hospital who require further treatment for an infection related problem transition to our Outpatient ID team, who provide exceptional high quality continuity of care.
Some of the common concerns for which patients are referred are evaluation for fevers of unknown origin, recurrent fevers, lymphadenopathy, neonatal infections (CMV, HSV and others), rare or serious infections in children such as pneumonia, meningitis, bone and joint infections, Kawasaki Disease, infections in immunocompromised hosts, fever in the returning traveler.
The clinic team manages oral and IV antibiotics for hundreds of children each year.
Children’s Colorado has one of the only comprehensive pediatric outpatient antimicrobial clinics in the region. In addition to state-of-the-art clinical care for complicated infections, the team members contribute to ongoing scientific research around the country.
Children’s Colorado infectious diseases specialists also are advocates with an emphasis on vaccine-preventable diseases through immunizations and infection control methods.
Jules Amer Chair in Community Pediatrics/
Child Health and Learning Collaborative
As part of the strategic work of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Jules Amer Chair in Community Pediatrics, Edwin Asturias, MD, and Shale Wong, MD, MSPH, formed the Child and Population Health Collaborative in June 2018. They brought together colleagues from across the Department of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital Colorado, and University of Colorado School of Medicine to share concepts, cross-link strategies, and explore collaborative opportunities from key stakeholders, including Denver Health, Kaiser Permanente, CIVHC, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and Tri-County Health.
Through a series of meetings and exchanges, the Child and Population Health Collaborative has advanced in the landscaping of the needs, opportunities and systems of collaboration to foster innovative and collaborative work working in population health for children.
In the future, we will be focusing on a few specific priorities that will strengthen alignment/capabilities with funders and public understanding and consensus to effectively shift health policy.
For more information on the Child Health and Learning Collaborative, please send an email to edwin.asturias@childrenscolorado.org, shale.wong@ucdenver.edu, or kris.beam@childrenscolorado.org.
Center for Global Health and Infectious Diseases
The Center for Global Health (CGH) at the University of Colorado (CU) serves to improve health and healthcare in communities around the world, through interdisciplinary collaboration within the University and with partners in research, education and health services. Our pediatric infectious diseases faculty (Dr. Edwin Asturias, Dr. Lisa Abougi, Dr. Samuel Dominguez, Dr. James Gaensbauer, Dr. Daniel Olson, and Dr. Eric Simoes) have been an integral part of the CGH efforts to conduct epidemiological, clinical trial, and pragmatic research in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Our faculty have led the development of the Global Health signature site and laboratory in rural Guatemala, carrying out research on vaccine-preventable diseases, diarrhea, tuberculosis, arboviruses and natural history studies on Zika. They also are conducting cardinal studies in the epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis and prevention of pneumonia, RSV, and HIV in these three regions.
Travel Clinic
The Travel, Expedition and Altitude Medicine (TEAM) clinic combines experts from the Division of Infectious Diseases, the Department of Emergency Medicine, the Altitude Research Center and Pediatric Infectious Diseases to provide comprehensive advice and treatment for travel and altitude illness.
While we provide routine advice for the prevention of travel-related illness, we specialize in the treatment of populations with complex medical issues seeking safe travel internationally or to high altitude areas- including children with immunocompromised states and medically complex needs. We have a diverse patient population, including a large proportion of travelers visiting friends and relatives.
Congenital CMV Clinic
The Infectious Disease (ID) Outpatient Clinic, based at the Children’s Hospital Colorado, developed a Congenital CMV Clinic in 2014 to ensure patients receive comprehensive care after diagnosis congenital CMV.
Since that time, the clinic has cared for and managed over 50 patients with symptomatic congenital CMV from all over Colorado and multiple other surrounding states.
The clinic is run by a Physician Assistant with an overseeing MD for expert care. During their time in the clinic neonates and infants are monitored closely for possible anti-viral medication side effects and families are counseled on the potential sequelae of the infection as well as prognosis.
The clinic also assists families with coordination of care for other subspecialty clinics including ophthalmology, audiology, neurology, ENT, and developmental pediatrics if indicated. In addition, we work in collaboration with pediatricians, audiology, ENT, and neonatologists from around Colorado to promote education and early screening for congenital CMV infections.
FMT Clinic
Experts in our Infectious Diseases (ID) Outpatient Clinic, in conjunction with our colleagues in the Digestive Health Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado, manage the only pediatric Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Program (FMT) in the state of Colorado. Our pediatric experts in Infectious Diseases and GI utilize the FMT procedure to treat patients with recurrent Clostridium difficile infections (CDI).
The FMT program is a nurse-driven procedure, one of the first and only in the nation, through delivery of donor stool via nasogastric tube or capsules which are swallowed. This method keeps costs low and does not require anesthesia. The success rate of cure of CDI 3 months after the procedure is about 92% in otherwise healthy children.
In March 2018, the FMT clinic published in the peer-reviewed journal, Pediatrics, showing the nurse-led intra-gastric FMT procedure using stool from a donor stool bank is a relatively inexpensive and efficacious treatment for recurrent CDI in children.
The clinic serves not only the state of Colorado but has also seen patients from around the United States as well as international patients. At Children’s Hospital Colorado, our FMT experts see positive results in cases of C. diff where antibiotics have failed kids in the past.