By Patrick Crowley
FSU College of Medicine
Through their daily interaction with patients, physicians routinely generate questions they know would be great research topics and lend themselves to improved patient care. But time and resources generally get in the way.
Physicians are busy. And their private practices, clinics and many hospitals are generally not set up to support research — they are focused on providing direct patient care.
Enter FSU Health, a transformational initiative launched by Florida State University to improve health in Florida by leveraging the university’s cutting-edge research capabilities and educational programs to forge new partnerships with clinical care providers. As part of the FSU Health initiative, university leaders are marshalling resources to support faculty, students and staff in the university's 17 colleges who are pursuing health-related work, including the College of Medicine's clerkship faculty interested in supporting student research.
“This partnership with the Office of Research, coupled with the vision and resources of FSU Health, is truly a win-win for our students and clerkship faculty,” said Alma Littles, M.D., dean of the College of Medicine. “It is incumbent upon us to provide the best education possible for our students so that they can become outstanding health care professionals, providing care for the people of Florida and beyond. Working with practicing physicians — in real-world settings — will have a significant and positive impact on patient care and outcomes.”
Resources run the gamut from proposal development, grants and contracts, biostatistics and informatics, to compliance and Institutional Review Board requirements, and everything in between.
“One of the key aspects to being a great clinical provider and physician is to be able to take basic science and information, which includes research, understand how to read the research, and translate it to patient care, because ultimately we're all patient educators,” said Matthew Lee (M.D., ’06) an early adopter of student research, and a surgery clerkship faculty member through the Tallahassee Regional Campus. “A physician is a patient educator, and if we can take the information from research and be able to relate it directly to patient care, that really helps the student's medical education.”
Lee is fortunate. Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic, where he practices, has a close relationship with FSU and actively supports student research through its TOC Foundation. TOC physicians are currently mentoring 12 students. Further cementing the partnership, TOC has hired Emilie Miley, Ph.D., as its director of research. She also holds a research faculty position in the Anne Spencer Daves College of Education, Health and Human Sciences, where she also serves as the assistant director of Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Research in the college’s Institute of Sports Sciences and Medicine.
“The TOC partnership with FSU is instrumental,” Miley said. “There are so many things that a researcher needs access to. You need access to articles, because not everything is open-source text. Having the connection to the academic institution really helps with that and it helps with things like REDCap,” which is short for Research Electronic Data Capture, a secure web-based application used to build and manage online surveys and databases for research studies.
“As practicing physicians, we have the clinical data. We have the patient databases, but we don’t have the time. We have ideas,” Lee said, adding that TOC has, on average, more than 280,000 office visits each year. “It really comes down to finances, time and resources as to why private practice physicians cannot produce research at the level that’s required today without assistance. The patient ultimately benefits, as well as the students, if there is collaboration.”
Lee added that the “link between the private practice and academic institution is something I think needs to be created or replicated in a greater fashion.”
Working behind the scenes to help strengthen those partnerships and infrastructure is a core group of researchers, faculty and administrators, including Xian Jin Xie, Ph.D., the College of Medicine’s senior associate dean for Research and Graduate Programs. He and Suzanne Baker, assistant dean for Graduate Programs and Medical Student Research, are finding ways to build those resources to improve the student research experience and engage more faculty.
“Clerkship faculty have told me they are interested in research, but they likely need assistance on where to start,” Xie said. “We are building the infrastructure needed for them to be successful and have an opportunity to grow. The FSU College of Medicine brings great opportunity and value. Rather than focusing on just one teaching hospital, we can aggregate data from our clinical partners statewide.”
A crucial part of the FSU infrastructure, according to Xie, was the strategic establishment of 10 “hubs,” the result of a needs assessment done in partnership with Guidehouse Consultation and extensive focus groups.
“The College of Medicine cannot do this alone,” Baker said. “We need a university community and Florida State’s Office of Research is making this happen.”
Xie added, “Participation in and a better understanding of research creates better physicians in many ways. Evidence-based care can be enhanced by a better understanding of the research process. It expands problem-solving and differential diagnosis skills. Researchers are answering the questions we don’t have answers to yet.”
Ashley Mays, M.D., who is currently mentoring two FSU medical students, agrees. She’s an otolaryngologist focused on head and neck cancer surgery and reconstructive plastic surgery at Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital in Vero Beach, as well as an FSU clerkship faculty member at the college’s Fort Pierce Regional Campus. Both she and TOC’s Lee had one thing in common as medical school students: an interest in research.
“Medical schools would be doing students a disservice by not teaching them the research process and helping them find avenues to perform research,” Mays said. “I can tell you in my own training, if you didn't come with an application listing a robust research background, you weren't going anywhere. There was no way you were going to match into these very competitive residencies and fellowships. I do truly believe it is on the medical schools to plan for that and provide those opportunities.”
Mays has had medical students, including FSU’s Mikalin Huckeba, working on a variety of research projects, including thyroid cancer management and diagnoses. And, just like Lee, she helps students prepare for poster presentations and publishing their work.
“I’ve always had an interest in research, though it initially felt daunting and hard to navigate,” said Huckeba, a second-year medical student from Eastpoint, Florida. “This experience has deepened my respect for research and its role in advancing health care and improving communities. At the moment, I’m particularly drawn to topics related to head and neck conditions. This project has broadened my understanding of the patient’s journey during thyroid cancer treatment, both the positive experiences and the challenges. That insight will help me better support and guide patients as a future physician.”
As a busy surgeon with her own practice, Mays says one key to her research success — and working with students — is personal interest.
“I come from a very, very robust research background,” she said. “You have to start with personal interest. I would have never matched at MD Anderson Cancer Center for my fellowships if I didn't come with a long, robust history of research myself. So, I think it starts with a personal interest and continuing to grow research programs. I think to make it work and also being a very busy surgeon, you just have to be efficient. You have to understand what it takes to get a student signed up for research, how do you get them through the project and how to manage that. It's just a time-efficiency thing. But it has to start with personal interest.”
Mays admits she is not aware of all the resources the university offers to researchers but is glad there is a concerted effort to help clinicians.
“I'm certainly happy to hear that there's more of a push in that direction,” she said.
If you are a clerkship faculty member interested in serving as a faculty mentor on a research project or want more information, contact research@med.fsu.edu.
