Latest IMPH Community News

A team of researchers from Vanderbilt Health and Vanderbilt University’s schools of Law, Medicine and Management has received a five-year $1.7 million research grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality of the Department of Health and Human Services to develop and test “safe-harbor” standards of care based on scientific evidence. A goal of the project is to reduce the number of unnecessary medical procedures performed primarily to reduce legal liability, a practice known as defensive medicine. Benefits could include lower costs and improved quality of care, resulting from medical patients’ reduced exposure to radiation.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has established a new career development program for scientists in implementation research. The goal is to speed the uptake and translation of scientific discoveries into routine clinical practice. The program, called Vanderbilt Scholars in T4 Translational Research, or V-STTaR, is supported by a five-year, $3 million grant awarded this month by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). T4 refers to the translation of research findings into “real world” and community settings. V-STTaR will be led by Sunil Kripalani, M.D., MSc, principal investigator and associate professor of Medicine, and Christianne Roumie, M.D., MPH, program director and associate professor of Medicine and Pediatrics.

Sara Van Driest, M.D., Ph.D., who is developing methods for precision dosing of pediatric medications at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), has received a 2017 Clinical Scientist Development Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Sara Van Driest, M.D., Ph.D. Van Driest, assistant professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at Vanderbilt, is one of 17 junior physician scientists chosen this year from among 196 applicants to receive the award, which provides $495,000 in research support over three years to support their transition to independent clinical research. Van Driest is the fourth current physician-scientist at VUMC to receive a Clinical Scientist Development Award from the New York-based foundation.

Nitin Jain, M.D., MSPH, associate professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Orthopaedics, has been awarded a $7.5 million contract to determine whether surgery or non-operative therapy works better for a common age-related injury that costs the health care systems billions of dollars — rotator cuff tears. “More likely than not, each one of us knows someone who has either had a rotator cuff tear, causing shoulder pain, or has actually had surgery,” Jain said. “That’s what led us to this work. This is a question patients were asking, that doctors were asking. ‘If a patient comes into my clinic with a rotator cuff tear, what should I do for that? Should I offer them surgery or should I offer them physical therapy?’ This is one of the most common reasons patients go to see their doctors — not just specialists, but any doctor. It’s an important public health issue.”