Emergency Medicine Research Program
The mission of the Northwestern University Emergency Medicine (NU EM) Research Program is to be a leading national academic department that provides patient centered time-dependent acute care in a manner that optimizes efficiency, safety and outcome.
Structure
The structure of the research section is built around individual mentorship teams. These are led by senior investigators, many of whom have advanced degrees with formal research coursework training. They are responsible for the projects under their direction and meet with their teams as needed to accomplish the primary goals of presentation, publication, and grant writing. Collaborative meetings targeted to specific projects or research focus areas occur periodically and may be scheduled through Dr. Courtney who leads the administrative and day-to-day functions of research in the Department of Emergency Medicine.
Personnel
Several researchers in the Northwestern University Department of Emergency Medicine have completed formal coursework in research methodology and they include:
- D. Mark Courtney, MD
- Rahul Khare, MD
- Demetrios Kyriacou, MD, PhD, MPH, DTM&H
- Paula Tanabe, PhD, MPH, RN
Other senior faculty have specific areas of training and expertise. They include:
- Amy Kontrick, MD - education methodology
- Michael Gisondi, MD - clinical education
- John Vozenilek, MD - simulation and education
Additionally, there are four emergency medicine fellows completing 2-year, interdisciplinary programs. They include:
- Patrick Lank, MD – Research Fellowship, Master's of Science in Epidemology and Biostatistics, 2012
- Danielle McCarthy, MD - Health Services Fellowship, class="apple-converted-space" Northwestern Institute for Healthcare Studies, 2012
- Emilie Powell, MD/MBA - Health Services Fellowship, Northwestern Institute for Healthcare Studies, 2011
- David Salzman, MD - Medical Simulation and Immersive Learning Fellowship, Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine Center for Simulation Technology and Immersive Learning, 2011
The Department of Emergency Medicine also has research assistants who work with investigators primarily on funded projects, but may also have effort allocated to mission-critical research activity. This may be in areas such as facilitating promising grant submissions from pilot data or providing meaningful interdepartmental research collaboration with other non-EM investigators.
The NU EM research vision is to create an environment focused in the domains of:
- Health Services Research
- Clinical Care for High Stakes Diagnosis and Therapeutics
- Medical Simulation
Realizing this vision will result in:
- NU EM patients experiencing state of the art timely care that is the benchmark for quality and efficiency
- NU faculty nationally leading efforts to define quality care for predefined content areas
- Residents and junior faculty with promise in investigation experiencing mentored stepwise career development in health services and simulation in acute care content areas.
Funding for our research comes from a variety of sources including federal agencies, non-profit organizations, and friends of emergency medicine. Emergency Medicine also benefits from collaborative relationships with other departments and institutes within the Feinberg School of Medicine. In recent years, our investigators have cultivated particularly strong relationships with Pulmonary/Critical Care Medicine, Cardiology, Dermatology and Hematology/Oncology as well as the Institute for Healthcare Studies and the Buehler Center on Aging, Health and Society.
The benchmark for success in realizing this vision over the next 5 years will be a steady and increasing stream of federal funded research dollars supporting simulation, emergency health services research, and time dependant acute clinical care research.
