A NEW RESEARCH STRATEGIC PLAN FOR SUNY UPSTATE MEDICAL UNIVERSITY
REPORT OF THE EDUCATION RESEARCH WORKING GROUP Task force members: Amy Caruso Brown, Lynn Cleary, Rachel Fabi, Lauren Germain, Rebecca Greenblatt, Andreas Meier, John Norcini, Bruce Searles, Tammy Austin-Ketch, Stephen Knohl, Chris Morley and Eric Olsen Additional Internal Reviewers Who Provided Substantive Feedback: Seth Perry, Wendi Ackerman and Susan Wojcik
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Educational Research Working Group met four times and worked both independently and collaboratively toward the completion of this report. Our findings indicate that there are many disparate areas of strength and potential throughout the organization that could serve to advance educational research at Upstate. However, there are three primary structures that would facilitate this endeavor: 1) strong academic data hygiene and governance, 2) adequate personnel and infrastructure, and 3) an organized approach. We believe that with these three things, Upstate could move to the cutting edge of research in health professions education, which would lead to gains in learner recruitment as well as faculty retention and satisfaction. We understand that the return on investment in educational research is different than the other types of research and that it often brings in less external funding (though several identified funding sources support projects in the six or seven figures). As such, the benefits of a robust educational research infrastructure are outlined in the introduction to this report. I. IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH WITHIN ACADEMIC MEDICAL CENTERS The value of research is often measured in the extent to which it is funded, or attracts funding, from outside entities. There are funders that provide extramural support to institutions for medical education research projects, but they often come with smaller overall budgets and lower or non-existent indirect cost capture. There are, however, several downstream benefits to supporting a robust medical and health professions education research engine at Upstate. These investments may have less tangible and measurable, but nevertheless real, financial and operational benefits as well, often in the form of cost savings. 1. Accreditation processes are often approached as relatively last-minute data accumulation efforts, which end up costing thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars to rectify. An active research mission may produce regular answers to questions that arise on accreditation and similar efforts, and which cost money to answer. 2. High level educational research can inform our practices, improving both our learning outcomes as well as student satisfaction. Active and rigorous monitoring (using research methods, as opposed to casual or reactive data collection) can offset downstream costs when the institution has to retroactively study and remediate problems such as Graduation Questionnaire and alumni survey issues, standardized test failures, issues in residency matching, etc. Robust and active medical education research can identify and correct problems before they become expensive to fix, and can serve an important Quality Assurance/Quality Improvement function.
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