Department of Research & Evaluation News

The Care Improvement Research Team has awarded funds for 7 new research projects led by Southern California Permanente Medical Group scientists and physician researchers on COVID-19 and other health topics to help improve the care physicians provide for their patients.

“This kind of research provides important new evidence to our frontline clinicians,” said Nancy Gin, MD, regional medical director of Quality and Clinical Analysis, Southern California Permanente Medical Group. “This has been more essential than ever during the pandemic, in which we are dealing with a new disease that our researchers are helping to find answers for in identification of risk, health impact, treatment and so much more.”

When scientists team with frontline clinicians through CIRT, they explore research questions together that can identify ways to improve practice throughout Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Funding internal research projects is designed to embed research into clinical practice.

“CIRT supports research that will improve quality, efficiency, and affordability of care,” said Adam Sharp, MD, MSc, an emergency medicine researcher with the Department of Research & Evaluation and leader of the CIRT program. “Another important area of focus is health equity.”

Projects span range of clinical topics

The research projects funded by CIRT this year represent a variety of clinical areas.

Some projects focus on different aspects of the pandemic, including household transmission of COVID-19, understanding and supporting confidence in COVID-19 vaccination among Kaiser Permanente Southern California health care providers, and developing and testing a tool to identify patients at risk of serious illness during COVID-19.

“Even now, 11 months into the pandemic, many questions still remain unanswered,” said Benjamin Broder, MD, regional assistant medical director of Quality and Clinical Analysis and interim senior director of research. “Our large population enables us to answer some of these questions using our own data, gaining insights beyond what has been published in the peer-reviewed literature.”

Research & Evaluation investigators are also leading projects about other important care topics. One looks at approaches to improving cultural sensitivity when caring for patients with depression. Another is implementing and evaluating a screening and evaluation system for pediatric primary care.

SCPMG physicians are leading a project about the effect of cooling on hemodynamics in inpatient dialysis, and another on using transient elastography in a tertiary care center before and after implementation of an electronic medical record-based clinical decision-support tool.

CIRT also continued funding for 6 of its own core projects. They include depression screening among cancer survivors, developing a model to estimate risk for COVID-19 with variable biomarker data, reducing readmission rates at Kaiser Permanente Southern California facilities, lung cancer screening and pulmonary nodule evaluation, preventing venous thromboembolism in high-risk abdominal surgery patients, and evaluating the impact that implementing high-sensitivity Troponin has on Kaiser Permanente Southern California members.

Research creates new tools for frontline physicians

CIRT supported research last year that helped to accelerate learning about COVID-19 at a particularly critical time. The team partnered with the Regional Research Committee to fund 4 rapid-cycle projects, which have since led to the development of new tools to help frontline clinicians in the emergency, hospital, and intensive care settings make care decisions.

The first of these tools rolled out in July 2020, just months after research began. The COVAS Score helps emergency and urgent care physicians determine which patients can be sent home safely on their own and which need home monitoring or hospitalization.

Another tool, which estimates mortality risk for patients on mechanical ventilation, was implemented in January 2021. A third, which helps predict which hospitalized patients are at risk for deterioration, was rolled out in the first quarter of 2021.

Photo taken pre-pandemic