Fakhir Elmasri, MD, FSIR
Challenges and benefits The two primary hurdles to conducting research in private practice are income and infrastructure. There may be no built-in infrastructure or research budget within private practice, but determined IRs can overcome these challenges, Dr. Katzen said.
While practices likely won’t earn money from research, they can break even—and reach a level where they can hire one or more research coordinators to take some of the load off clinicians.
“Our vision for trials was that we just didn’t want to lose money,” Dr. Elmasri said. “That’s how we got into it; we were happy to break even. Even without profit, we think it is really very positive because we contributed to the research.”
To build a research program takes an internal champion leading the way, Dr. Katzen said. In addition, “you need to have physicians that have intellectual curiosity and actually want to be involved in the research—they understand the big picture.”
It also helps to have a partnership with a hospital that is supportive of the efforts, he said, particularly nowadays when protocols to ensure safety and data integrity have become more rigorous.
In private practice, it’s hard to justify to your partners covering the expenses for research trials, particularly a dedicated research coordinator, said John Lipman,
Barry T. Katzen, MD, FSIR
MD, FSIR, founder and medical director of the Atlanta Fibroid Center.
It could take four or five active trials to cover the costs of a research coordinator, according to these IRs. Dr. Katzen’s group now has several research coordinators as well as support from residents and fellows. Through a partnership with Florida International University’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, medical students help with institutional data collection (not actual clinical trials). Currently, medical students are pulling together 10 years of the center’s data on two competing procedures for the physicians to compare.
The group also welcomes a research scholar each year from the University of Heidelberg in Germany whose objective is to generate manuscripts and support the research program.
With or without help, IRs often conduct the bulk of the research responsibilities, which will need to be slotted in between patient care and other duties.
Beyond the contribution to the literature, involvement in research has benefits for practice marketing, physician recruitment and patient care. IRs with more experience using newer—perhaps more effective—treatments can attract patients from all over their region. Plus, patients enrolled in clinical trials may be able to receive treatment with cutting- edge devices or may be followed longer and more consistently because of the study’s requirements.
John Lipman, MD, FSIR
While practices likely won’t earn money from research, they can break even—and reach a level where they can hire one or more research coordinators to take some of the load off clinicians.
For more information on grants and funding, visit
sirfoundation.org.
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