Anna Costello is a Pediatric Rheumatology Fellow at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a student in the Masters of Science in Health Policy Research Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her undergraduate and medical school studies at Brown University before coming to CHOP for her Pediatrics Residency. She served as a chief resident at CHOP and then worked as a Pediatric Hospital Medicine attending for several years before deciding to return to fellowship. During her time as a Hospitalist, she engaged in clinical research about diagnostic error as a cause of hospital readmissions and served an active role in the creation of CHOP’s Center for Diagnostic Excellence. She recently completed a Diagnostic Excellence Fellowship with the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine during which she started to study diagnostic delays in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis. Her long-term career goal is to improve outcomes and quality of life for children with rheumatic disease by promoting timely, accurate, and equitable diagnosis. Her husband is a Pediatric sports medicine attending at CHOP and they have a toddler named Zoe who already diagnoses people with arthritis (video footage available on request)!
The goal of this project is to inform targets for intervention in future studies to improve diagnosis and promote diagnostic excellence for pediatric rheumatic diseases.