OCTOBER 2022

INTRODUCING THE PATH SCHOLARS PROGRAM

PaTH is pleased to announce the PaTH Scholars program, established following a successful pilot implementation from 2020-2021 at the University of Pittsburgh. The PaTH Scholars program aims to mentor and engage scholars through hands-on participation alongside experienced PaTH researchers, as well as improve the capacity of PaTH sites to oversee research in our network. PaTH Scholars receive salary support in exchange for approximately four hours a week dedicated to PaTH research and scholarship that will give them experience in pragmatic research, multi-site trials and electronic health record (EHR)-based observational studies, and collegial connections with collaborators across the country.

In sum, our goal is to help researchers gain the skills and confidence needed to lead and participate in multi-site “real-world evidence” studies.

PaTH will sponsor three Scholars each year with awardee sites chosen on a rotating basis. In 2022-2023, we are happy to introduce the following Scholars to the PaTH Clinical Research Network:

Natalie Lee is an Assistant Professor of General Internal Medicine at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Her research interests are generally concerned with access to health care and how we can design and implement better strategies to improve access. One strategy Dr. Lee is pursuing involves integrating machine learning approaches and tools into clinical workflows. She hopes that her experience as a PaTH Scholar will give her more insight about how PaTH facilitates collaborative research across multiple sites and how she can build collaborative research relationships at other sites.

Carrie Daymont, Associate Professor in Pediatric and Public Health Services, is our PaTH Scholar from Penn State College of Medicine. Dr. Daymont uses electronic health record (EHR) data in her research on children’s growth and she is finding the need for researchers to understand the quality of the data they use in analyses. Through participation as a PaTH Scholar, Dr. Daymont hopes to both share her experience in EHR data curation as well as learn more about the PaTH and PCORnet® resources and processes for using multi-site EHR data in patient-centered research.

Jon Arnold formally begins his PaTH Scholar tenure this fall, but he has been participating in PaTH-affiliated research for quite some time already, including as Principal Investigator of an industry-sponsored EHR data analysis of patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and severe hypertriglyceridemia. Dr. Arnold is a certified Internal Medicine specialist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s McKeesport hospital and is further certified in Clinical Informatics. His training and experience with EHR data and interfaces are valuable to our research teams, and we are happy that he will continue his work with the PaTH network into 2023.

In addition to joining the work of local and network-wide research teams, PaTH Scholars and alums can also serve as PCORnet® ambassadors within their home departments to help spread awareness of PaTH/ PCORnet® resources and stimulate new studies of national scope that leverage PCORnet® resources. Join us in welcoming Drs. Arnold, Daymont, and Lee to the PaTH Network!

From left to right: Drs. Lee, Daymont, and Arnold.

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