An Academic Research Coach: An Innovative Approach to Increasing Scholarly Productivity in Medicine
BACKGROUND: Academic faculty who devote most of their time to clinical work often struggle to engage in meaningful scholarly work. They may be disadvantaged by limited research training and limited time. Simply providing senior mentors and biostatistical support has limited effectiveness.
OBJECTIVE: We aimed to increase productivity in scholarly work of hospitalists and internal medicine physicians by integrating an Academic Research Coach into a robust faculty development program.
DESIGN: This was a pre-post quality improvement evaluation.
SETTING: This was conducted at the University of Washington in faculty across three academic-affiliated hospitals and 10 academic-affiliated clinics.
PARTICIPANTS: Participants were hospitalists and internists on faculty in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Washington.
INTERVENTION: The coach was a 0.50 full time equivalent health services researcher with strong research methods, project implementation, and interpersonal skills. The coach consulted on research, quality improvement, and other scholarship.
MEASUREMENTS: We assessed the number of faculty supported, types of services provided, and numbers of grants, papers, and abstracts submitted and accepted.
RESULTS: The coach consulted with 49 general internal medicine faculty including 30 hospitalists who conducted 63 projects. The coach supported 13 publications, 11 abstracts, four grant submissions, and seven manuscript reviews. Forty-eight faculty in other departments benefited as co-authors.
CONCLUSION: Employing a dedicated health services researcher as part of a faculty development program is an effective way to engage clinically oriented faculty in meaningful scholarship. Key aspects of the program included an accessible and knowledgeable coach and an ongoing marketing strategy.
© 2019 Society of Hospital Medicine
Historically, academic medicine faculty were predominantly physician-scientists.1 During the past decade, the number of clinician-educators and nontenured clinicians has grown.2 Many academically oriented clinical faculty at our institution would like to participate in and learn how to conduct quality scholarship. While institutional requirements vary, scholarly work is often required for promotion,3 and faculty may also desire to support the scholarly work of residents. Moreover, a core program component of the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education standards requires faculty to “maintain an environment of inquiry and scholarship with an active research component.”4 Yet clinical faculty often find academic projects to be challenging. Similar to residents, clinical academic faculty frequently lack formal training in health services research or quality improvement science, have insufficient mentorship, and typically have limited uncommitted time and resources.5
One approach to this problem has been to pair junior clinicians with traditional physician scientists as mentors.6,7 This type of mentorship for clinical faculty is increasingly difficult to access because of growing pressure on physician-scientist faculty to conduct their own research, seek extramural funding, meet clinical expectations, and mentor fellows and faculty in their own disciplines.8 Moreover, senior research faculty may not be prepared or have the time to teach junior faculty how to deal with common stumbling blocks (eg, institutional review board [IRB] applications, statistically testable hypothesis development, and statistical analysis).8,9 Seminars or works-in-progress sessions are another strategy to bolster scholarly work, but the experience at our institution is that such sessions are often not relevant at the time of delivery and can be intimidating to clinical faculty who lack extensive knowledge about research methods and prior research experience.
Another approach to supporting the research efforts of academic clinicians is to fund a consulting statistician. However, without sufficient content expertise, statisticians may be frustrated in their efforts to assist clinicians who struggle to formulate a testable question or to work directly with data collected. Statisticians may be inexperienced in writing IRB applications or implementing protocols in a clinical or educational setting. Furthermore, statistical consultations are often limited in scope10 and, in our setting, rarely produce a durable improvement in the research skills of the faculty member or the enduring partnership required to complete a longer-term project. Because of these shortcomings, we have found that purely statistical support resources are often underutilized and ineffective.
Other models to facilitate scholarship have been employed, but few focus on facilitating scholarship of clinical faculty. One strategy involved supporting hospitalist’s academic productivity by reducing hospitalists’ full-time equivalent (FTE) and providing mentorship.11 For many, this approach is likely cost-prohibitive. Others have focused primarily on resident and fellow scholarships.5,6
In this report, we describe an educational innovation to educate and support the scholarly work of academic hospitalists and internists by using an academic research coach. We recruited a health researcher with extensive experience in research methods and strong interpersonal skills with the ability to explain and teach research concepts in an accessible manner. We sought an individual who would provide high-yield single consultations, join project teams to provide ongoing mentorship from conception to completion, and consequently, bolster scholarly productivity and learning among nonresearch clinicians in our Division. We anticipated that providing support for multiple aspects of a project would be more likely to help faculty overcome barriers to research and disseminate their project results as scholarly output.
