The Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineered Point-of-Care Technologies (ACME POCT) is dedicated to developing, translating, and integrating into clinical practice, microchip-based technologies for medical applications, with a specific focus on devices for heart, lung, blood, and sleep medicine applications. The Administrative Core of ACME POCT described here will provide several functions. First, the Core will be responsible for providing administrative structure, organization, and leadership. The ACME POCT leadership is carefully balanced to be equally distributed at Georgia Tech's Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), Emory University's School of Medicine, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA). Accordingly, the co-PI's of the ACME POCT are Wilbur Lam, MD, PhD, an Emory/CHOA pediatric hematologist and biomedical engineering professor based at both Georgia Tech and Emory with experience in POC technology development (with recent FDA approval of a hematology medical device), Greg Martin, MD, MSc, who is a clinical pulmonologist, Associate Division Director for Critical Care at Emory, and Director of the Georgia CTSA's Clinical Research Network, and Oliver Brand, PhD, a micro/nanosystems engineer and Executive Director of the IEN at Georgia Tech. In addition, the Administrative Core will also provide communication support throughout the ACME POCT. By design, to facilitate communication among the Cores of the ACME POCT, each PI leads one of the Cores such that the leadership of the Center is involved with the day to day activities of a major aspect of the ACME POCT. In addition, due to the complex nature of our Center, the ACME POCT will engage in multiple meetings to ensure cross-communication among the different Cores and the PDDP projects. Importantly, the Program Administrator will attend all meetings to ensure that all Cores and programs of the ACME POCT tie together. Moreover, web-based and social media tools will be used to communicate announcements, such as our national annual Pilot Device Development Program grant solicitations and our Annual National POC Conference. Finally, the Administrative Core will continuously evaluate and improve the ACME POCT. To that end, the Administrative Core will coordinate with the leadership of the Technology Training and Dissemination Core to gather and analyze evaluative data to identify challenges in optimizing the impact of ACME POCT activities across each Core function. These data will be shared with the External Advisory Board and serve for continuous quality improvement activities internally and in partner institutions, including specifically in enhancing quality and efficiency of technology development and validation. Therefore, a primary responsibility of the Administrative Core will be interpreting information about ACME POCT performance and developing plans for changes and improvements.
