Kevin H Latz, MD

Section Chief, Sports Medicine; Associate Professor of Orthopedic Surgery, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine; Clinical Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery, University of Kansas School of Medicine

Full Biography

Kevin Latz, MD, MBA, Orthopedic Surgery, was awarded a one-year, $10,000 2023 Community Access to Child Health (CATCH) Program grant from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Dr. Latz’s project, “Decreasing Delays in Pediatric ACL Care,” will develop a set of feasible, collaborative initiatives that improve access to pediatric ACL care.

This project builds on the work initiated by Donna Pacicca, MD, who was previously with Children’s Mercy and is now at Connecticut Children’s, as well as the efforts of Micah Sinclair, MD, who was the orthopaedic surgery QSVI (Quality, Safety and Value Initiative) champion, and George Thomas, Research Learner, Graduate Medical Education.

“My personal experiences with many children who are experiencing delays in their ACL care motivated my interest in this health topic,” said Dr. Latz. “Once a child has an ACL injury, they meet with multiple community members, including coaches, athletic trainers, pediatricians, sports medicine physicians and surgeons, physical therapists, and imaging centers. We hope to investigate which of these networks has bottlenecks to efficient care and how to decrease those barriers.”

A collaboration to streamline referral and scheduling between each of these groups hasn’t been formed but, with this grant. Dr. Latz and his team will foster such a collaboration. Through this grant, the team will form a task force to implement a set of community partnership initiatives that feasibly streamline access to pediatric ACL care.

“We realized that not just in our community but in Children’s Mercy, we were not meeting the needs of this patient population,” Dr. Latz said. “With increased access to ACL care, we hope that overall sports medicine access will increase in our community.”

The study team is made up of Shannon Margherio, PT, OCS, organizer, clinical trials coordinator, and physical therapist, Michael Denning, DPT, physical therapist.

The CATCH Program is a national initiative of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that supports pediatricians to lead innovative, community-based initiatives that increase children’s access to optimal health or well-being.