Trainee Spotlight: Adesuwa Emovon, MMCi - Clinical Research that Improves Access to Healthcare and Empowers Caregivers

Adesuwa Emovon has always enjoyed working with children, whether it involved teaching them a new concept or playing games. As a graduate student, she sought out the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development to broaden her experience in working with children with disabilities and their families and learn more about research. 

During her training experience at the center, she saw how technology could facilitate healthcare access and improve quality of life for autistic children and their families. Her mentor was Lauren Franz, MBChB, MPH, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who is a child and adolescent psychiatrist.  This experience cemented clinical research as a priority for her career in academic medicine, building her confidence in pursuing independent research, particularly in the area of neurodevelopment, she says.

Emovon worked on a study aimed at helping primary care providers make more informed decisions about how to help a child with disabilities, especially during that important time when the provider has to decide whether to refer the child for a diagnostic evaluation and early intervention services. She helped develop a tool that a pediatrician can consult to make informed decisions about how best to help a child flagged as having a developmental concern, including autism.

The goal is to help families connect to diagnostic and intervention services sooner. “Providers can use a clinical decision support tool to enhance patient care across diverse populations,” Emovon says. “This is especially important with the rise in provider burnout, medical errors, and worse health outcomes for racial and ethnic minority patients.”

However, the success of a clinical decision support tool in healthcare will largely depend on how physicians embrace these tools and incorporate them in their clinical practice. Thus, she believes, it’s important that the center include pediatricians and other providers in the design and implementation of these tools, as the study aims to do.

As Emovon continues on her medical career path, she envisions integrating her affinity for supporting children with her research training at the center, along with concepts she learned from a Master of Management in Clinical Informatics degree at Duke and her interests in neurodevelopment and pediatrics. Ultimately, she hopes to conduct clinical research that improves healthcare access through technological innovation.

Reflecting on her time at the center, Emovon says her most meaningful experiences include observing Dr. Franz providing parent coaching for families of young autistic children. She learned about using therapy techniques that are part of the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) with caregivers during their coaching sessions. ESDM is a naturalistic developmental behavioral therapy model for children between 12 and 48 months old in which caregivers use play to encourage social and communication development.

Emovon’s role was to videotape the sessions. She also recorded and analyzed interviews with providers, parents, and autistic adults; the interviews were designed to provide feedback on a version of the ESDM parent coaching therapy delivered via an app.   

Now a first-year medical student at The Pennsylvania State College of Medicine (Hershey), Emovon is building on her experiences at the center. “My goal is to be a trusted resource and support for my patients,” she says, and developing more reliable tools that can guide decision-making by providers is part of that vision.

Another favorite memory from the center was watching caregivers become empowered to help their child learn to communicate with others. For Emovon, research and technological innovations should serve to reduce barriers to care and foster those social interactions. “I could really see how important those sessions were for children and their families,” she concludes. “It was such a privilege to have that experience while working with Dr. Franz.”