Let's say you have the greatest medicine and it meets a vital need, but you can't persuade doctors to use it. The University at Buffalo has a federal grant to bridge that gap, what's called implementation science.
It's been a problem for years in the medical field, translating proven medical research into patient care. It's so much of a problem that the National Institutes of Health have been issuing some implementation grants, like the $3 million to UB.
Dr. Ranjit Singh, an associate professor of Family Medicine and vice chair for research in the Family Medicine Department at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, said this translation has to be done in a way that doesn't overload doctors.
"How do you help doctors to provide better care of their patient in a way that doesn't worsen their burnout," said Singh, "and that includes not just the doctors, but the whole team of people taking care of the patient, the nurses, the nurse's aides, the secretaries, and officers in a hospital are under a lot of pressure. When we ask them to do more and more for the patients, it puts them at risk of burnout."
There is just so much medical research flowing onto the scene over the web. The goal is to help doctors and care teams wade through that research and find what they need for their patients.
"Clinical trials that will demonstrate that the drug works," he said. "Our job once they have discovered that it can work under ideal conditions with specific types of patients, then our job is to figure out how to get practicing physicians out in the real world to use this drug to help their patients."
