Mia Harton, MD, MS, Joins UPMC Newborn Medicine Program

Mia Harton, MD, MS, joined the UPMC Newborn Medicine Program as an assistant professor of Pediatrics, following completion of her neonatal–perinatal medicine fellowship at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in June 2025. As an attending physician, Dr. Harton divides her clinical time between the NICUs at UPMC Children’s and UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital. As part of her new faculty role, Dr. Harton has taken on a leadership position as associate program director for the neonatal/perinatal fellowship program alongside director Nicole Dobson, MD.

A Beginning in Bioengineering and a Shift to Medicine

Dr. Harton’s path into neonatology started with her early academic background in biomedical engineering. As an engineering undergraduate at the University of Virginia, she initially considered careers in medical device development and orthopaedic bioengineering. However, with through clinical shadowing time, she found that her interests were leaning more toward something with direct patient care versus purely engineering options

“Whenever I was in the clinic shadowing physicians, I thought, this is what I want to do,” says Dr. Harton.

After completing her undergraduate education, Dr. Harton spent a year teaching at a boarding school in England, an experience that reinforced her passion for education and mentorship. After this year away from academic studies, Dr. Harton enrolled at and subsequently earned her medical degree from Saint Louis University School of Medicine. During medical school, she initially considered pediatric cardiology as a subspecialty due to its systems-based physiology and an alignment with her engineering background and mindset.

“My brain is very analytical. I was drawn to cardiology at first because it made sense to me from an engineering perspective. It’s a pump and it’s linked to a complex delivery system. Simple, but extraordinary in its capabilities, efficiency and design,” says Dr. Harton. “But what I found in my early NICU experiences was that I still got to think through physiology in a detailed way, but I also got the whole picture of the individual. You’re not just focused on one organ in the NICU, and you also get a range of acuity — from sick, critically ill babies to well babies who just need to feed and grow, and everything in between,” says Dr. Harton.

During residency at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Dr. Harton’s clinical experiences in the NICU confirmed her decision to pursue neonatal/perinatal medicine as a subspecialty.

“They had to force me to go home during my NICU rotations. That’s when I knew this was the right place for me and my medical career,” says Dr. Harton.

Fellowship at UPMC and Specializing in Medical Education

When applying to fellowship programs, Dr. Harton prioritized three things: program with high-volume clinical exposure, hands-on experience in neonatal transport, and the opportunity to pursue a formal graduate program in medical education. The UPMC Newborn Medicine Program stood out in all three aspects.

“I wanted a program that was clinically busy where I would see as much as possible and get hands-on experience,” says Dr. Harton. “Fellow transports were also important to me. And I was interested in completing a master’s degree in medical education. This was one of the few places where fellows actually had the support to finish a master’s during training. So, UPMC checked all the boxes I was looking for.”

During her fellowship, Dr. Harton enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Clinical Research Education (ICRE) and completed a Master of Science in Medical Education concurrently with her neonatal–perinatal medicine fellowship. Balancing both programs required careful time management, but the integration of graduate coursework with clinical practice helped shape her long-term academic focus.

“It gave me the foundation to approach education not just as a teacher, but as a designer of systems and assessments,” says Dr. Harton.

During her final fellowship year, Dr. Harton served as chief education fellow and took the lead on orientation for new trainees and curriculum redesign work.

Curriculum Development and the Limits of Traditional Evaluation

Dr. Harton’s academic interests center on the design of educational programming and the development of reliable tools for assessing procedural competency in medical trainees. She is particularly interested in exploring methods of evaluating hands-on skills, such as line placement and ultrasound-guided access, skills that are difficult to measure through written tests or traditional assessments.

“Curriculum development is kind of the gateway into medical education, but I’m especially interested in evaluation, particularly of procedural competency,” says Dr. Harton. “How do we assess that a learner is actually competent to place a catheter in a newborn using ultrasound? You can’t test that with a multiple choice quiz,” says Dr. Harton.

Her approach to training emphasizes real-time supervision, repeated practice, and systems that enable continuous learning at the bedside.

Building a NICU POCUS Training Program at the Bedside for IV Access

During her fellowship, Dr. Harton identified a recurring clinical challenge in the NICU at UPMC Magee: neonates, particularly extremely preterm or critically ill infants, were being transferred to UPMC Children’s

Hospital not for advanced subspecialty care, but because bedside teams were unable to establish reliable peripheral IV access prompting escalation to central venous catheters or transfer to a higher-acuity setting.

Establishing vascular access in neonates is notoriously challenging, even for clinical staff with many years at the bedside. In very low birth weight infants, veins are small and fragile, peripheral perfusion is often poor, and multiple failed attempts can quickly lead to tissue damage, swelling, or bruising making further access attempts more difficult. As line attempts accumulate, the risk of complications rises, and options for escalation narrow. When peripheral access fails, the next steps often include interventional radiology and surgically placed central lines which carry with them an increased risk of infection (CLABSI), longer hospitalizations, transfers, and exposure to ionizing radiation

Dr. Harton encountered this problem while seeking a topic for her fellowship research project. She had recently begun learning point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) techniques for peripheral IV placement herself and saw an opportunity to address the gap more systematically.

“I didn’t know how to do ultrasound-guided IVs at the beginning of fellowship,” says Dr. Harton. “I learned it during my second year through focused training and many hours of practice, and once I started getting better at it, I realized this was something we needed to be teaching more broadly to our trainees and staff.”

For her project, Dr. Harton proposed developing a training program focused on ultrasound-guided peripheral IV access and applied for and received a Beckwith Institute Frontline Innovation grant to pilot the idea. From the beginning, Dr. Harton’s goal was to create something practical, scalable, and embedded within the clinical workflow of NICU at UPMC Magee.

“There was no formal POCUS training in place before we started the project. A few people had picked it up informally over time, but there wasn’t a system to teach it or support learners wishing to become proficient in the skill,” says Dr. Harton.

Rather than using intermittent simulation sessions, Dr. Harton built the program around in-unit, real-time procedural coaching. She maintained (and still does) a dedicated pickle phone that bedside teams could use to request access support, and she committed to being physically present in the NICU every weekday to assist with procedures, provide hands-on instruction, and track learner progress.

“If someone needed help, they’d text me, and I’d come to the bedside,” she says. “It wasn’t a lecture or a checklist. It was hands-on, real-time feedback on real patients. That’s how you build procedural skills.”

Over the course of her third fellowship year, Dr. Harton supervised more than 150 ultrasound-guided access attempts and helped approximately a dozen learners - fellows, APPs, and NICU nurses – achieve competency in the POCUS guided IV placements. She tracked individual progress, identified common barriers, and began designing more structured training materials to ensure the program could continue beyond her fellowship.

“We didn’t start with a formal curriculum, but once I saw how much demand there was, I realized we needed something sustainable,” says Dr. Harton. “I leaned on my medical education training to build tracking tools, define learning milestones, and figure out what competent performance really looks like.”

The impact of the POCUS project was pretty much felt immediately. The NICU at UPMC Magee experienced fewer transfers for access-related issues, a reduction in central line placements, and growing confidence among providers in their ability to secure IV access safely and independently using ultrasound guidance.

“This project changed how the unit manages getting IV access in our neonates,” says Dr. Harton. “And it’s a model we can keep building on — for PICC lines and for other procedures like umbilical catheterization or lumbar punctures, both which we have coming soon and will be led by other individuals. Using ultrasound guidance for these things has tremendous upside for our tiny patients but it takes the right resources and focused training to make it happen. Fortunately, we’ve been pretty successful so far and have had the backing of leadership, which is essential for these types of projects”

What started as a fellowship research project has turned into a program-level quality improvement initiative in neonatal care, driven by a fellow who learned the skill herself, understood the clinical stakes and utility of POCUS-guided line placements, and designed a teaching model based in the realities of bedside medicine and education in the exceptionally busy level NICU at UPMC Magee.

“When we succeed in placing a line using ultrasound, we’re not just avoiding another stick, we’re avoiding an interventional procedure, an OR visit, or a surgical central line, all of which come with substantial risks – infection, thrombosis, and others,” says Dr. Harton. “This kind of work builds clinical capacity. We’re developing a system that can scale and improve safety for our patients.”

A Future in the NICU

“This is an exciting place to be. It’s a big, busy program, and you get to see so much,” says Dr. Harton. “I’ve really enjoyed training, working, and living in Pittsburgh, and I’m looking forward to continuing to grow as a neonatologist and an educator.”