Research In Practice Blog
October 2023 marks one year since Clinical Futures announced our new name and identity. Since then, we've continued to achieve excellence in pediatric research and implementation. Watch as the story of our Center is told by some of our experts: Alexander Fiks, MD, MCSE; Jeffrey Gerber, MD, PhD; Alix Seif, MD, MPH; George Dalembert, MD, MSHP; Elizabeth Lowenthal, MD, MD, MSCE; Susan Furth, MD, PhD; Halley Ruppel, PhD, RN; Jennifer Walter, MD, PhD, MS; Greg Tasian, MD, MSc, MSCE; Robert Grundmeier, MD; Charlotte Woods-Hill, MD, MSHP; Stephanie Mayne, PhD, MHS; and Pamela Weiss, MD, MSCE.
The History of Clinical Futures
Clinical Futures began more than 15 years ago. Since that time, it’s grown immensely, eventually becoming the Center for Pediatric Clinical Effectiveness and, most recently, Clinical Futures. - Alexander G. Fiks, MD, MSCE | Director, Clinical Futures
Clinical Futures is a multidisciplinary group, an academic home for clinicians, researchers, biostatisticians, methodologists, who are all unified to try to develop and implement evidence to make kids healthier. - Jeffrey S. Gerber, MD, PhD | Deputy Director, Clinical Futures
Clinical Futures has a hand in both understanding the nature of the problem, studying the interventions, and then turning that into real world sustainable change. - Alix E. Seif, MD, MPH | Core Faculty, Clinical Futures
Clinical Futures is very focused on implementation, and so you get to see some of these effects trickling out into the community at various levels. - George Dalembert, MD, MSHP | Core Faculty, Clinical Futures
Solving the Research-to-Practice Gap
It can take as much as 17 years or more for findings from research to then make their way into clinical practice. That’s a whole generation of children who grow up without the benefit of those insights. So, if we could cut that to 5 years, to 3 years even 7 years, a whole generation of children could benefit who potentially otherwise might not have. - Dr. Fiks
"As a mother, a pediatrician, and an advocate, I could talk to you for days about why pediatric care is so important. Children can’t advocate for themselves much of the time. And getting the best care as a child really has repercussions for how a person will survive and thrive." - Elizabeth Lowenthal, MD, MSCE | Core Faculty, Clinical Futures
Clinical Futures By the Numbers
The Center has more than 85 faculty members with about 200 total faculty and staff. We’ve developed and expanded fellowship programs and many of those people we’ve trained have now gone on to be leaders in the field. And, when we connect those different people, we can potentially break down silos and bring the best ideas into research and then ultimately into practice. - Dr. Fiks
Clinical Futures within the CHOP Research Institute
The Research Institute encompasses all the research that’s done across the departments at CHOP. Clinical Futures is one of the Centers of Emphasis in the Research Institute. Clinical Futures is really focused on driving change in how we take care of patients where they are. - Susan Furth, MD, PhD | EVP & Chief Scientific Officer, CHOP Research Institute
Having Clinical Futures located in the Research Institute at CHOP means that we can translate all these findings into practice so much more quickly. - Halley Ruppel, PhD, RN | Core Faculty, Clinical Futures
Tackling Big Problems
We’re not afraid of big problems. We’re the nation’s first children’s hospital. We have one of the oldest research institutes. We have institutions like Clinical Futures which are willing to tackle sizeable issues because we know that’s what we have to do to make sure that kids attain their best health. - Dr. Dalembert
The Clinical Futures group is a really welcome home for that more expansive thinking, thinking about some of the ways in which we might need to tackle Social Determinants of Health and understanding how to best address pediatric chronic illness or other types of health problems for children. - Jennifer Walter, MD, PhD, MS | Core Faculty, Clinical Futures
Research Methodological Pillars
One of the strengths of Clinical Futures is its diversity. The way that’s represented in the organizational structure of Clinical Futures is its pillars. - Gregory Tasian, MD, MSc, MSCE | Associate Co-Director for Clinical Trials, Clinical Futures
We have organized the Clinical Futures approach through 6 different pillars: Biostatistics, Clinical Epidemiology, Clinical Trials, Comparative Effectiveness, Implementation Science, and Social Science in Healthcare Delivery. Many of our studies are using multiple of those pillars if not all of them to attack a question, and that’s how we get at the answers in the best way. - Dr. Gerber
Researchers as Clinicians
It’s so important that as researchers we also remain clinically active. It’s really hard to conceive of effective interventions to help improve upon that process if you don’t actually have a foot in that clinical world. - Robert W. Grundmeier, MD | Core Faculty, Clinical Futures
The greatest part of this is having exposure to everyone’s work and having this community of like-minded researchers with one common mission, which is improving children and families’ health and wellbeing. - Charlotte Woods-Hill, MD, MSHP | Core Faculty, Clinical Futures
We have a really huge breadth of the types of problems that people are working on, a huge range of clinical content areas, but everybody is really united by our focus on methods and using the most rigorous tools and methods that we can. - Stephanie Mayne, PhD, MHS | Associate Director, Clinical Epidemiology, Clinical Futures
My research family is Clinical Futures—these are the people that I look to for ideas to help my grant proposals to be successful. My colleagues usually are the ones who have the ideas that help me succeed. - Pamela F. Weiss, MD, MSCE | Associate Co-Director for Clinical Trials, Clinical Futures
I see Clinical Futures as bringing together different people, and I look forward to seeing those interconnections blossom, to growing the support we have from different funder to achieve these goals, and really to expanding our impact across the different pediatric settings and child health settings where so much is needed to help kids live healthier lives. - Dr. Fiks
There are many conditions right now that hospitalize hundreds if not thousands of kids per year. By harnessing the data from our electronic health record and being able to conduct clinical trials, we can continue to reduce that morbidity, reduce hospitalization, and even reduce mortality. And the hope is that a few years from now, we will have improved the lives of children in many ways. - Dr. Gerber
*This transcript has been edited for readability.