LIVE EVENT: Healthy Homes Grand Rounds (July 1, 2025)

Overview

The Pediatric Environmental Health Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and the New England Region Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit (PEHSU) welcome health professionals to attend the monthly virtual Pediatric Environmental Health (PEH) Grand Rounds.

This Grand Rounds series will provide healthcare providers with state-of-the-science content on current topics in pediatric environmental health. Such information will fill in the knowledge gaps of practitioners, enabling them to effectively counsel families whose children face possible health issues due to environmental chemicals, toxins, and other insults. The PEH Grand Rounds will also educate on practice strategies for the biomonitoring of children at risk for specific exposures to environmental pollutants.

Course Format 

This course will be Presented online via Zoom, optimizing virtual interactions between faculty and participants and facilitating interactive discussions.

Course Topic: 

Heat Education Alert Tool (HEAT) Response Initiative: Addressing Extreme Heat through Public Health Agency, Health Care and Community Partnerships

In this Grand Rounds, they will review background information about extreme heat on health and will briefly recap the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Heat Education Alert Tool (HEAT) Response Initiative in 2024 – 2025 and the data driven Unhealthy Heat Threshold initiative. Finally, they will speak to the importance of the collaboration between Public Health Agencies, Health Care Professional and Community Partnerships in building resiliency to Extreme Heat.

A short Q&A will follow the presentation.

Learning Objectives: 

At the conclusion of this educational program, learners will be able to:

1. To understand the impact of extreme heat on health on communities and vulnerable Populations
2. To understand the use of Heat Education and Alert Tool (HEAT) Initiative and the creation of an unhealthy heat threshold and its use in guiding clinical, public health and community responses to extreme heat events
3. To describe the importance of the collaboration between Public Health Agencies, Health Care and Community Partnerships

Speakers:

Marissa Hauptman, MD, MPH, FAAP

Nalina Narain, PhD

Physician
Boston Children’s Hospital designates this live activity for a maximum of 1.00 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits ™. Physicians should claim only credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in this activity.

Physician Assistant

Boston Children’s Hospital designates this live activity for a maximum of 1.00 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits ™. Physicians should claim only credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in this activity.

Nurse

Boston Children’s Hospital designates this activity for 1.00 contact hours for nurses. Nurses should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. 

Nalina Narain, PhD

Dr. Nalina Narain leads the Bureau of Climate and Environmental Health within the Department of Public Health. She became Director three and a half years ago and was previously Deputy Director in the bureau for several years. In this current role, she has broad oversight for compliance with about 15% of the department’s statutory mandates including the state’s Lead Law, Housing and Food codes, and regulations governing radiation control and public health protections.   She has taken steps to prioritize health equity, expand the Bureau’s climate justice and health initiatives, as the important work to investigate exposures to contaminants in drinking water, air, soil, food, for potential links between these exposures and patterns of disease in our communities continues.

Dr. Narain previously worked within the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at DPH. There she oversaw refugee and immigrant health, including medical screening programs for all arriving refugees in Massachusetts, public health follow-up for communicable diseases such as tuberculosis and hepatitis B to provide patients with immediate primary care, and the implementation of TB prevention initiatives at community health centers.

Prior to joining DPH in 2013, Dr. Narain was pricing policy director at the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (now known as Center for Health Information and Analysis).  She oversaw the development and implementation of pricing and payment policies and gained hands-on understanding of financing, regulatory procedures, hospital discharge data and Medicaid contracts. She is an immigrant herself, who arrived in the United States in the early 1990s and obtained her first graduate degree in international development.  Her initial US work experience included direct services and advocacy to survivors, as well as policy work in domestic violence and sexual assault programs.

Dr. Narain’s subsequent doctoral work at Brandeis University strengthened her foundation in research development, implementation and analysis, with a focus on community-level initiatives and response.  Both her academic and her professional work have emphasized the practical, yet sensitive and thoughtful application of knowledge and policy judgments to the most vulnerable populations among us.

Marissa Hauptman, MD, MPH, FAAP

Dr. Hauptman is a board-certified general pediatrician, mother, environmental medicine physician-scientist, and co-director for the Boston Children’s Pediatric Environmental Health Center and the Region 1 New England Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit and an inaugural Chief Medical Advisor at the Bureau of Climate and Environmental Health at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Each week, in addition to her general pediatrics primary care practice, she provides multidisciplinary clinical care for children with lead poisoning, mold exposure, asthma, emerging water contaminants and other environmentally-mediated disease processes. Her career is dedicated to mitigating environmental and climate injustices for pediatric and reproductive-aged populations through the intersection of public health and medicine. Her work particularly focuses on the importance of systematically integrating socioeconomic and environmental exposure and climate vulnerability data and environmental health related screening tools into pediatric medicine to address environmental and social health disparities in children with chronic diseases. She has an NIH/NIEHS K23 Career Development Award to further this work. Dr. Hauptman has leveraged her expertise as a physician-scientist in pediatric environmental medicine to make important clinical advances and innovations in the field of childhood lead poisoning, asthma, extreme heat and other environmental and climate justice issues and has received numerous local, regional and national awards for her work.

These accolades include most recently the 2025 Academic Pediatric Association Early Career Research Faculty Award, one of 5 finalists honored at the 2025 inaugural Boston Children’s HERStory Award for Trailblazer in Innovation and Research, honored at the 2025 City of Boston Climate Leadership Award Ceremony, the 2024 Boston Combined Residency Program (BCRP) Academic Development Mentorship Award and the 2007 Rhode Island Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program Healthy Housing Award.

Disclosures

Boston Children’s Hospital adheres to all ACCME Essential Areas, Standards, and Policies. It is Boston Children’s policy that those who have influenced the content of a CME activity (e.g. planners, faculty, authors, reviewers and others) disclose all relevant financial relationships with commercial entities so that Boston Children’s may identify and resolve any conflicts of interest prior to the activity. These disclosures will be provided in the activity materials along with disclosure of any commercial support received for the activity. Additionally, faculty members have been instructed to disclose any limitations of data and unlabeled or investigational uses of products during their presentations.

The following planners, speakers, and content reviewers, on behalf of themselves, have reported the following relevant financial relationships with any entity producing, marketing, reselling, or distributing health care goods or services consumed by, or used on patients: 

Name, Degree	Entity Name, or None

Please see the FAQs below for common questions about how to work through a course. If you have a question or issue that is not addressed in the FAQ, please use this form to submit a help request, or if your issue is urgent, call the CME office at: 617-919-9908.

How do navigate this course?

How do I navigate this course?

There are two ways to access and navigate course content with the interactive table of contents: at the bottom of the main course page or in the sidebar on the right side of the page. Select the links in the table of contents to access the corresponding content. Depending on the course, access to content may be linear, in which case each content module or section can only be accessed if the prior ones are completed, or non-linear, in which case modules and sections can be accessed in any order. Use the breadcrumbs at the top of any course page to orient yourself within a course, or return to a previous course section or the main course page.

How do I claim credit for this course?

How do I claim credit?

If the course has been accredited, available credits will be displayed on the course home page. Select only those credits that apply to your profession, and click/tap “Apply Selection.” You may make your selection at any point while you are taking the course, or after you have completed it.

How do I download a certificate?

How do I download a certificate?

There are two ways to view/download your certificate: from within the course or from the course listing under your profile (select the document icon). In either case, you must have selected at least one available course credit type to generate a certificate.

How do I view/print my transcript?

How do I view/print my transcript?

You must be logged in to view your transcript. Select My Profile at the top of the page. If you do not see the transcript selector, be sure the Courses tab is selected. Select the type of credit and dates to include in your credit report. To include all credits from all time, leave the options blank. Select Download Transcript to view/download your transcript. Note each credit type in your transcripts starts a new page.

How do I request a refund?

How do I request a refund?

Please email the CME Department to request a refund.