Progress Toward Goals.

Today I received notice that MECMC considers me qualified to lead Human Subjects Studies, provided they have no direct patient contact, only data. Which is exactly as it should be. I have no interest in attempting to conduct clinical trials, etc.. I live strictly in the Quality Improvement arena. My desire is to continue to publish computer simulations of health care systems, and the effects of applying systems engineering methods to health care delivery. I’m not going to be involved in any research that intervenes with specific patients.

So, I now have a document that officially declares me a Principal Investigator at MECMC. Pretty exciting. Of course, I still haven’t negotiated all the hurdles associated with research training, and that sort of thing. It’ll be some time before I’m actually doing research. Probably several months. But I am, at least, not going to have to fight about being qualified to submit my own studies to the IRB.

The hardest part, I think, is going to be getting my colleagues who have never done research to do the training and plan the IRB submissions ahead of time, rather than trying to be retrospective about it. My intention is to submit basically everything I do to the IRB, so that in the event anything publishable comes out of it, we will have prior approval. So, I’ll need my team members to go through the training so that they can work the protocols too. At least, if they want to be authors. Which I’m sure they will. I think.

In any case, I’m making progress, but continuing to pursue the avenues of interest to me. As a result, today I am a PI again, at MECMC, and that’s exciting to me. But it isn’t my real work. My real work is solving problems. So I’m going to go get back to that.