Aug 30
2:46 pm
As I wrap up my time at UNC Chapel Hill and my on-site work at the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention I realize how fast eight weeks can go. I remain extremely excited about prevention medicine and believe even more strongly that speaking to individuals about diet and exercise, and offering methods to change poor habits, is important. In addition, my visit to Lenoir County and my interaction with the participants demonstrated how determined and successful a group of people can be when all are motivated and supported in their efforts to change lifestyle habits. This is a…
Aug 28
1:44 pm
We are a few weeks into the MSTAR program and the summer days have been long but fleeting. Our most recent didactic session was truly dynamic; topics from prostate cancer screening, survey development and funding and grant writing were studied. It was an informative and lively session. I’m continuing my work at the Non-Invasive Cardiology unit at Mount Sinai, studying patient outcomes after a myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) test. My project will investigate differences between patients over age 80 that have an “abnormal” MPI study and those that have a “normal” study. We will also…
Aug 24
11:43 am
The three weeks after my last post proved vastly different from the first few I spent at the Bronx VA: our patient recruitment jumped up to 5-7 a week! By now, I imagine I could administer the baseline questionnaire in my sleep. In addition to study enrollment and follow-up phone calls, I've spent a lot of time doing chart abstraction for the nearly 60 patients now enrolled in the study to better understand "my" population. Even within a geriatrics cohort, the range of the patients' health status amazes me—one chart might show thirteen active medications, six chronic conditions,…
Aug 21
4:08 pm
My research is continuing to go well. My project consists of looking at how much time physicians in the Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors (MSVD) program spend providing care outside of home visits. Physicians have been filling out research forms I’ve created for every interaction/event they have outside of the home visits related to patient care. I’m currently in the last week of data collection. I’ve been entering data for the last couple of weeks and I’m nearing the end of it, thankfully. Entering the data has taken much more time than…
Aug 20
3:44 pm
My experience thus far in the MSTAR program has been both enlightening and motivating. I am currently doing glioblastoma (brain tumor) research at the Duke University Medical Center and have been making good progress. I have identified a cohort for the basis of my projects and am performing chart reviews to extract the necessary data for analysis. I am pretty excited to finish completing all of the data collection and begin analysis, which will surely provide insights for improving the management of glioblastoma in the elderly. Performing chart reviews has also vastly increased my knowledge in the treatments for glioblastoma,…
Aug 13
4:31 pm
I am now near the midpoint of my retrospective chart review as part of the MSTAR program and the project has been an even greater learning tool than I originally anticipated. I have been looking at medical records for quite some time now and thus the daily process of reviewing them has become fairly automatic. However, I am still intrigued by the information I find while reading through cases. After looking through many records, I have begun to pick up on trends even before performing statistical analysis. For example, in my study on elderly patients undergoing surgery for hip fracture,…
Aug 07
4:27 pm
I have completed over a month of research and have fallen into a daily routine. I have learned the difficulties of gaining approval from clinics to recruit patients there. I realize that it is a concern for clinics because patients with appointments are generally sick and do not want to be bothered by research studies. They may already be anxious about having to visit the doctor and don’t want to fill out any unnecessary paperwork, especially for a medical student who is not treating them directly. Although I have accepted that getting rejected is a part of patient…
Aug 03
12:35 pm
Today marks the halfway point in my 8-week MSTAR experience here at the University of North Carolina (UNC). The week began with the usual 10 a.m. database meeting with the primary investigators (MDs and PhDs), statisticians, physical therapist, epidemiologists, and research students such as myself. This is a fantastic meeting to sit in on because it focuses on all aspects of data processing, from collection to analysis. It is an arena for brainstorming, organizing and clarifying the existing and/or potential databases maintained by the Thurston Arthritis Research Center. At this meeting I spent most of my time absorbing information…
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