Training in Critical Care Health Policy Research

The central goal of this Training Grant in Critical Care Health Policy Research is to train leading academic clinician investigators who work to improve the quality, safety, equity, and costs of critical care delivery. Graduates of this program become leading, independently funded investigators producing evidence that prevents critical illness in the first place, improves bedside critical care delivery, and promotes more patient- centered outcomes among survivors of critical illness. These scholars work to improve population health, individual patient and clinician decision making, and relevant national policies. Since the program’s inception in 2010, we have trained or are currently training 38 physician scientists and have recently recruited our 15th cohort comprising 4 new physician scientists. Among many metrics of our success to date, of the 32 postdoctoral fellows who have completed their training, 85% remain at leading academic medical centers, and 75% continue to have research-oriented careers. As a core part of this training program, fellows pursue the Master of Science in Health Policy Research (MSHP) degree program offered by Penn’s School of Medicine and its Wharton School of Business. The program has been highly successful in attracting, training, and graduating fellows. Trainees receive an intensive, structured program of mentoring, didactic research training, and experiential research over two years. The program includes core courses in health economics, health policy, qualitative methods, and statistics; elective courses in advanced epidemiology or biostatistics, advanced health care economics, health care policy, statistics, survey design and measurement, social policy and demography, and grant writing; intensive mentoring in critical care health policy research by an extensive set of experts in the field; participation in multidisciplinary research and professional development seminars; instruction in the responsible conduct of research and regulatory affairs; and the development and completion of research projects in critical care medicine supervised by a multidisciplinary mentoring team. The program is primarily designed for postdoctoral physician fellows with clinical experience in all disciplines of adult and pediatric critical care. However, in response to trainee feedback and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the critical care work force, we propose with this competing renewal to begin accepting carefully selected nurse scientists from similar disciplines who also have a PhD in health policy or a similar field. The program emphasizes research designed to answer policy-relevant questions regarding how critical care is and ought to be organized, financed, managed, and delivered. This work is typically conducted by fellow-led teams that build upon and enhance Penn’s traditions of collaborative and interdisciplinary science.