The central goal of this Training Grant in Critical Care Health Policy Research is to train leading academic physician investigators who are capable of improving the quality, safety, equity, and costs of critical care delivery at the bedside, across populations, and alongside policymakers. Since its inception in 2010, this program has trained or is currently training 26 such physician investigators. Among many metrics of our success to date, of the 16 postdoctoral fellows who have completed their training, 13 (81%) remain active in clinical research and either have or are on track to receive appointments as Assistant or Associate Professors at leading academic medical centers. This application proposes to continue and enhance our program. As a core part of this training program, fellows pursue the Master of Science in Health Policy Research (MSHP) degree program offered by Penn's School of Medicine and its Wharton School of Business. The program has been highly successful in attracting, training, and graduating fellows from its first nine cohorts. Trainees receive an intensive, structured program of mentoring, didactic research training, and experiential research over two years. The program includes core courses in health economics, health policy, qualitative methods, and statistics; elective courses in advanced epidemiology or biostatistics, advanced health care economics, health care policy, statistics, survey design and measurement, social policy and demography, and grant writing; intensive mentoring in critical care health policy research by an extensive set of experts in the field; participation in multidisciplinary research and professional development seminars; instruction in the responsible conduct of research and regulatory affairs; and the development and completion of research projects in critical care medicine supervised by a multidisciplinary mentoring team. The program is designed for postdoctoral physician fellows with clinical experience in adult and pediatric critical care. The definition of critical care encompasses care for adults and children with severe acute medical problems, trauma, and post-surgical care in intensive care units (ICUs), cardiac care units, and emergency departments. It also includes the examination of strategies to improve care for patients at risk for requiring an ICU admission, and to improve long-term outcomes for patients who survive an admission and their families. The program emphasizes research designed to answer policy-relevant questions regarding how critical care is and ought to be organized, financed, managed, and delivered. This work is typically conducted by fellow-led teams that build upon and enhance Penn's traditions of collaborative and interdisciplinary science.
The morbidity, mortality, and costs attributable to critical illness are enormous and rising. This postdoctoral program integrates clinical experience, health services research training, policy analysis, and leadership and career development opportunities for physicians trained in adult or pediatric critical care medicine. These trainees form a cadre of physician leaders capable of improving the efficiency of critical care delivery at the bedside, across populations, and alongside policymakers.
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