Stroger Cook County Hospital
Department of Emergency Medicine
Research Division
The Department of Emergency Medicine is committed to the production of high quality research in emergency medicine, particularly in problems related to emergent illness faced by the urban and impoverished population served by Cook County Hospital. 

While we do not expect all residents to continue with research activities after residency, we feel that it is essential that residents are trained in research to understand the ethics, limitations and need for contributions of research to aid the advance of the practice of emergency medicine. It also helps in the appropriate evaluation of medical literature. A key skill developed and tested is the appropriate evaluation of medical literature.

Dr. Rebecca Roberts, our Research Director, is one of the nation's foremost authorities on medical economics.  She is available to help faculty design studies and secure funding for projects and their publication and/or presentation at national meetings.

Some of the Research division highlights include:

Goals:

  • Pursue scholarly activities that directly and specifically benefit our patients, hospital, specialty, and residents.

  • Collaborate with other disciplines, hospitals, and public health agencies to ensure we produce the most useful research with wide dissemination.

  • Develop areas of expertise within our department.

  • Educate our residents and faculty in critical literature review, incorporating new research into clinical practice, and advanced decision-making.

  • Provide a support framework for residents and faculty to participate in basic and advanced research techniques, paper and grant writing.

Major Focus Areas: 
Emergency Preparedness, Patient Safety and Medical Error, Computer-based Clinician and Patient Education Technologies, Medical Economics, Electronic Medical Record Design, Public Health Surveillance Research, Clinical Decision Making, Emergency Ultrasound, Infectious Diseases, Observation Medicine, Chest Pain Diagnostics, Asthma, and Graduate Medical Education. 

Current Programs:

  • Disaster Preparedness:  Stroger is in its 5th year as a “Center of Excellence” collaborating with the Chicago Dept. of Public Health and Chicago hospitals to improve emergency preparedness programs.  Priorities include:  surveillance for emerging public health threats, preparation for large patient surges, disaster drills and education.  This program has resulted in the development of original software for disaster logistics management.  We are also working with the CDC and Infectious Diseases toward implementing electronic public health surveillance and medical record decision support.  We collaborate on a multidisciplinary continuing education program live and using interactive computer and web-based technology.  Drs. Roberts, Lee, Feldman, Aks, and Weber are leading this program with the assistance of our disaster preparedness coordinator, Ms. Patricia Taylor.

  • Patient Safety:  Our patient safety faculty, Dr. Cosby, has just completed the analysis of over 600 morbidity and mortality cases.  This study examines the factors leading to medical error, types of errors and their outcomes.  This work provides a template for high priority intervention areas.  Dr. Cosby has also written an EM curriculum for patient safety and is the editor of one book on medical error and another on emergency ultrasound.

  • Patient Education:  Dr. Schabowski has developed an innovative waiting room patient education program.  She studies what facts have high patient impact and then uses video and computer-based technologies to achieve her goal of providing additional medical value for patients waiting to be treated.  

  • Economics:  We have published studies on the economics and outcomes of chest-pain evaluation, asthma, infectious diseases, HIV care, and observation medicine.  Our new projects include measuring the cost-benefit of public health surveillance, graduate medical education, the relative cost of treatment errors and prevention programs, medical and social costs of gun shot wounds, cost-effectiveness of enhanced chemical dependency programs, and the impact of electronic medical record systems.

Additionally, our faculty serve as members and chair national and regional committees on emergency response, economics, patient safety, public health, and asthma treatment guidelines.

One requirement for completion of the CCH-EM program is evidence of experience and competence in scientific research and writing ability. This may be accomplished by completion of a scholarly project and a research project. The scholarly project is intended to demonstrate proficiency in library research, synthesis of the literature and scientific writing skills. Examples of acceptable projects include: a case report with discussion, a review article, or a CPC, M & M, or "rounds" format case discussion in the format of an emergency medicine journal regular feature. 

The research project is intended to demonstrate familiarity with research methodology and study design, data collection and analysis, interpretation of results, integration and comparison with other published data in similar studies and participation in the preparation of the manuscript. To fulfill the research requirement, each resident must complete all of these steps. 


Research Division:
Rebecca R. Roberts, MD, Director
Patricia Taylor, Disaster Preparedness Coordinator
Karen Cosby, MD
Robert Feldman, MD
Rashid Kysia, MD, MA, MPH
Moses S. Lee, MD
Shari Schabowski, MD 



Contact: Rebecca Roberts, MD, Director, Research Division, Department of Emergency Medicine, Stroger Cook County Hospital/Rush University Medical College, 1900 West Polk Street, 10th Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60612; or E-mail to Ms Taylor: ptaylor@ccbh.org

rev 03/06/2008