Medical team in an emergency room

The Emergency Department is The “New” Frontier of Public Health

I had always considered my field of expertise to be emergency medicine. I worked through the ranks as an emergency medical technician, then onward as a paramedic, which included a nine-year stint on a busy medical helicopter. I worked in disaster medicine, and was the associate director of a Harvard-affiliated disaster medicine fellowship in Boston. My current practice is as a nurse practitioner in a busy suburban emergency department (ED) and I am still active in emergency medical services as a SWAT medic and as an educator.

The emergency part of what I do is the exciting part —the part that stimulates the excitatory neurotransmitters that flood the brain, preparing it to act quickly and concisely.

We are selling ourselves short, however, when we label this role as “emergency” providers. Instead, “public health provider” is a much more appropriate term to use, because emergency departments and those who provide care there are really public health workers.

All of us who practice in emergency medicine know that real emergencies are few and far between. Our day-to-day is much more mundane. We deal with many urgent issues as well as some less urgent, primary care problems. We may even spend time filling printer paper or bringing a patient their lunch. We may help to find someone a homeless shelter, send a family home with warm coats for the kids, or pack up a bag with food and toiletries for a young girl we feel is being trafficked.

In light of all this, the purpose and the policies of the emergency department need to be redefined. Read More

image of the hands of healthcare professionals stacked together

Now published: Consensus-based guidelines for the ethical oversight of Patient-Centered Outcomes Research

By Avni Gupta

Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) is characterized by patients participating in various research roles other than merely the subjects. The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), a major funder of PCOR research, defines patient engagement as including patients in all stages of research, “from topic selection through design and conduct of research to dissemination of results.”

However, while the concept of patient engagement in research and its potential for benefitting science are increasingly recognized by funders and investigators, IRBs’ comfort with patients in non-traditional roles in research protocols lags behind.

IRBs’ familiarity with patients in research has traditionally been with patients who are study participants or subjects, and are considered “vulnerable.” Therefore, many IRBs’ review process focuses on ensuring that adequate protective measures are in place to “protect” the patients, including measures such as a detailed written informed consent, continuing review, confidentiality measures, and so on.

Read More

doctor and patient talk

The non-capture capture of “patient voice.” Isn’t it ironic?

Register here for this weeks’s event, “Putting Patients at the Center of Research: Opportunities and Challenges for Ethical and Regulatory Oversight”

In a previous life I was a headline writer, so I have to give props for the title of this Friday’s Petrie-Flom panel: “Patients and Conflict of Interest: How Can We Keep the Patient’s Voice from Being ‘Captured’?

That is, how do you avoid “capturing” the patient voice when “capturing” the patient voice is the whole point of Patient Centered Outcomes Research? And yet this is a central challenge to bringing expertise unique to the receiving end of medicine and research into all levels of the process.

Read More

Investigating Conflicts of Interest in Patient-Centered Outcomes Research

By I. Glenn Cohen

The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) was established under the Affordable Care Act. Its goal is to fund and encourage Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR), understood as evaluating questions and outcomes that are meaningful not just to researchers, but to patients and caregivers as well.

One key way of achieving this is to involve patients as personnel in research projects as advisors, consultants, or team members involved in any aspect of research, from topic development through study design, implementation, interpretation, and dissemination.

But where do these patients come from? How representative are they of the patients who will ultimately participate in the study?

Read More

What is Patient-Centered Outcomes Research? What Ethical Issues Arise in its Conduct?

By Joel Weissman

Register here for this weeks’s event, “Putting Patients at the Center of Research: Opportunities and Challenges for Ethical and Regulatory Oversight”

Today it is not unusual for patients to expect to be engaged in making decisions about their own health care, in consultation with their doctors. This is commonly referred to as patient-centered care, and recognizes that patients are the best source of information about their needs and preferences.

A relatively newer concept is patient involvement in research on healthcare.

Traditionally, healthcare research has focused on critical events like death or complications, or physiological data from laboratory tests. But patients may be equally (and sometimes more) concerned about harder-to-measure results like quality of life, time spent at home with their families, or the ability to return to work.

Patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) recognizes that to better understand these kinds of issues, scientists should consult patients about the design and conduct of research. Therefore, PCOR is quickly becoming the standard.

Read More

Putting Patients at the Center of Research: Opportunities and Challenges for Ethical and Regulatory Oversight

Efforts to place the patient at the center of medical research, spurred by the Affordable Care Act’s founding of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, have begun to change the way clinical research is conceptualized and conducted.

Such efforts hold great promise, but also raise potential challenges for ethical oversight.

How should oversight bodies approach the presence of patients in potentially unfamiliar research roles, such as investigator? What forms of patient involvement in research, if any, warrant increased scrutiny from oversight bodies? How do we keep the patient voice from being ‘captured’ by special interest groups?

This symposium will bring together a diverse group of patients and community members, policymakers, bioethicists, and regulatory officials to address these and other issues.

Read More