Creating a Centralized Infrastructure to Facilitate Medical Education Research

Abstract

Purpose: Building research capacity and increasing scholarly productivity are identified needs of the specialty of family medicine. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has increased the scholarly requirements for residency programs, placing even more pressure on faculty to be productive in the scholarly realm. The Council of Academic Family Medicine Educational Research Alliance (CERA) was created by volunteer members of the specialty with shared interests in overcoming barriers and increasing scholarly production.

Methods: CERA has developed the infrastructure and expertise to regularly conduct omnibus surveys of key family medicine educational leaders. Proposals are centrally collected and competitively chosen. The omnibus survey process includes collaboration with experienced mentors, centralized institutional review board clearance, pilot testing, and centralized data collection. The survey results are disseminated back to research teams for presentation and publication of the findings.

Results: To date, over 115 research teams have had their projects included in CERA omnibus surveys. Projects have been led by research teams from across the country and with a wide variety of research experience. This collaborative work has resulted in more than 75 scientific presentations and over 55 peer-reviewed papers in the medical literature. The raw data are now available online and serve as a repository for future secondary analysis and as an educational resource.

Conclusions: The CERA infrastructure has allowed a large number of research teams to conduct meaningful scholarship at a fraction of the typical cost in terms of time and energy. CERA has expanded family medicine research by removing barriers for teams with limited experience or resources.

Keywords: primary care research; research capacity.

Figure 1

Research roles pyramid. This pyramid depicts the spectrum of roles faculty can perform when it comes to medical research. The bottom 2 levels represent continuous learning about, and the translation of, new medical knowledge. All faculty participate in research through consumption of the literature and all those that provide patient care participate by being direct utilizers of research findings. The middle 2 levels represent actual participation in the generation of knowledge. Ideally, a robust number of faculty will actively collaborate in the research generation in order to produce broadly applicable findings. A smaller number, with significant experience and interest, will become principal investigators answering their own questions. The top 2 levels represent leading others in the generation of new knowledge. Those researchers with the most and broadest experience will become positioned to lead research programs or even to set research agendas for institutions and broad networks of researchers.