Harvard Catalyst Profiles

University of the Philippines, Manila, Philippines	MD	05/2002
University of the Philippines - Philippine General Hospital, Manila, Philippines		12/2005	Pediatric Residency
University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland		06/2011	Pediatric Residency
Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland		06/2014	Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellowship
University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa	MS	05/2017	Translational Biomedicine

Dr. Cifra is a health services researcher in the field of diagnostic excellence in critical care. She completed pediatric critical care fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and received formal quality improvement training at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. She completed her MS degree in Translational Biomedicine at the University of Iowa. Dr. Cifra has published foundational studies on diagnostic error in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and has proposed a unified research agenda for diagnostic excellence in critical medicine. She is currently studying diagnostic error epidemiology and the role of diagnostic uncertainty in the assessment of critically ill children on PICU admission and is conducting ethnographic work in the PICU to delineate the role of referral communication in the PICU diagnostic process. She is also leading innovative work on standardizing referral communication for interfacility transfers to the PICU and improving feedback to PICU-referring clinicians.

• Pediatrics
• Critical Care
• Pediatric Intensive Care Units
• Patient Safety
• Diagnostic Error
• Quality Improvement
• Transitions, Health
• Communication