By Bill Snyder
The federal government has announced new support for the Learning Health Systems (LHS) T32 training program at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The program prepares researchers to discover, evaluate, and implement strategies to improve patient outcomes and, ultimately, the health of entire communities.
“The traditional approach to health care delivery separates scientific research, evidence generation, and practice,” said Christian Rumi, MPH, professor of medicine, pediatrics and health policy at Vanderbilt University. said. “These siled systems result in lost opportunities, wasted care, and costly and suboptimal care possibilities.”
The Learning Health System trains postdoctoral medical leaders in discovering and implementing new methods to deliver high quality health care while simultaneously advancing science. “This is an important next step in transforming a ‘reactive’ healthcare system into one that is ‘proactive’ and capable of improving the health of the population,” Rumi said.
Rumi is a co-principal investigator on a grant with Carlos Grijalva, M.D., Professor of Health Sciences, MPH.
Policy and biomedical informatics. This spring, he was awarded a renewal of $2.8 million in research training grant 5T32HS026122 over five years by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Support the continuation of the program. progresstargeting patient/practice outcomes and efficacy and systems science research, and since 2018, two years of cross-training in patient-centered outcomes research, implementation science, and health policy/community health to 16 researchers have provided.
For 2020-2022 trainee Dr. Jennifer Richmond, Master of Science, the program “helped me grow and achieve several career goals with an emphasis on health equity… ( It gave me
I had a supportive mentor and provided excellent training.
“I especially benefited from my training in implementation science, which set aside time for me to focus on growing as an independent researcher,” she continued. “This protected time has helped me learn new data analysis skills, publish high-impact research, and tap into (VUMC’s) extensive grant writing and other professional development resources. ”
Ms. Richmond joined the Vanderbilt program in 2020 after completing her PhD in Health Behavior from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
During graduate school, she participated in a leadership development program supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a Health Policy Research Scholar and contributed several journal articles examining the negative impact of inequalities in access to health care and mistrust of health care. .
Thanks to Vanderbilt’s program, she was able to apply for the National Cancer Institute’s two-year K99 Independent Pathway Award for “promising postdoctoral fellows.” The award supports her research into ways to improve equity in lung cancer screening in populations disproportionately affected by lung cancer.
“This study will help address an urgent public health need, increase screening equity, and help eligible patients benefit from proven strategies for early detection of lung cancer,” said Wakeforest. Richmond, who accepted a faculty position at the university’s medical school, said. in autumn.
Joseph Stearns, M.D., MPH, will begin the second year of his 3-4 year Pediatric Cardiology Fellowship at VUMC this fall and is one of two trainees joining the PROgRESS program this year. .
Like Richmond, Stearns is also interested in investigating ways to improve health equity. His project will investigate the accuracy of fingertip pulse oximetry in detecting severe congenital heart disease in dark-skinned newborns.
A pulse oximeter is a fingertip device that can non-invasively measure oxygen levels in the blood by analyzing a light beam as if it passed through the finger. Abnormally low blood oxygen levels indicate that the heart is not working properly.
“All babies in the United States are screened with a pulse oximeter before they are discharged from the hospital to check for congenital heart defects that require surgery or intervention within the first year of life,” Stearns said.
“There is increasing literature that pulse oximeters are less accurate in darker-skinned people,” he says. “We are overestimating oxygenation, which means that children who theoretically pass screening because their oxygen supply is overestimated will end up with severe congenital heart disease. Our group will exist.”
His project compares oximetry readings with blood gas readings from needle-collected blood samples to determine the accuracy of oximetry in newborns with different skin tones. Ultimately, we hope to develop an algorithm that can compensate for differences in skin color and make oximetry of all babies more accurate.
Stearns conceded that it is difficult to get funding for pilot projects like his. That is why his T32 supervised research support provided through PROgRESS is so important.
This provides time shielded from the clinical obligation to learn how to conduct research, and allows independent research grants in the future while pursuing important clinical questions that have heretofore not been thoroughly explored. Be ready to win the competition to win
Since his medical school days, Stearns has been committed to improving equity in healthcare for all. “This project helps bridge that,” he said.
