With growth of managed care and the growing interest in combining high quality of care and low cost, we see an acute need to train clinicians to be health services researchers. The objective of this program is to significantly strengthen the health services research training program for individuals coming from backgrounds in medicine, nursing, and dentistry. To accomplish this objective, the goal is to: 1) Systematically examine the educational needs of clinical learners and juxtaposing the current courses and degree programs against these requirements. From this analysis and through a series of discussions with leaders in our own institution as well as with the faculty of our Department, make the indicated changes in courses and/or degree requirements. 2) Develop a clinical outcomes data laboratory. This will create a facility to enable students to access a series of clinically relevant databases. These will include community wide data sets (e.g. hospital discharge, mental health, immunizations, and perinatal data) and claims and electronic patient record data from a variety of clinical settings. In the future, similar data sets for clinical health services research from state wide and national sources will be added.
