APHA Awards Jared Silberlust the Jay M. Bernhardt Excellence in Student Leadership Award
Jared Silberlust, an M.D./M.P.H. candidate at the Miller School of Medicine and Department of Public Health Sciences, was awarded the Jay M. Bernhardt Excellence in Student Leadership Award at the 2019 APHA Annual Meeting and Expo. The award is given to students who excel in communications, information technology, and/or public health.
At this year's annual meeting, Silberlust presented a project on clinical trials and predictors of patient consent, a topic that he has been passionate about for many years. He has previously worked with health systems, such as Northwell Health in New York, as well as at UHealth, to improve the quality and usability of electronic medical records (EMR).
“Some of the projects that I’ve been involved with include building a vaccine schedules into EMRs and developing a mobile application where patients can schedule appointments with physicians,” Silberlust said.
The ability to generalize conclusions and identify effective solutions relies on a sample of patients that accurately represents the general population but recruiting a diverse population of participants has been a challenge for researchers.
The poster presentation at APHA, which was co-authored by Silberlust, Maritza Suarez, M.D., an internist and chief medical informatics officers at UHealth, Alberto Caban-Martinez, Ph.D., an associate professor at the Miller School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences, examined electronic medical record data to determine predictors of a patient's willingness to consent to be contacted regarding clinical trial opportunities at a large academic medical center. To conduct the study, they derived data from PatientAtlas, which is an EMR relational database that was created from patient records from November 2016 through August 2018.
“Using PatientAtlas, a database that interfaces with UHealth’s UChart EMR, we were able to show that patients who were of racial/ethnic minority and patients who discussed the possibility of research involvement with their primary care doctor were less likely to consent to participate in research than white men at specialist offices,” he said.
There was a total of 320,117 patients who were seen at the medical center, of which 73,456 consented to be contacted regarding research studies. Researchers found that patients who were older, non-Hispanic, Caucasian, obese, and who were seen by a non-primary care provider consented to be contacted for research more often than other groups of patients.
Silberlust and the research team noted that interventions to increase diversity in health research can be tailored to patients who belong to groups that do not participate as often. Most research trials, he noted, are conducted on individuals who do not represent the group of people for whom the treatment is aimed, so researchers are trying to find ways to increase diversity in their trial cohort.
"Although primary care providers often have better relationships with their patients, patients are less likely to sign up for research involvement at the time of seeing a primary care provider," Silberlust added. "Providers, therefore, have an opportunity to spark interest in their patients and significantly increase the pool of available patients willing to participate in research, which could allow researchers to select a more diverse and representative patient population for their trials."
Written by Amanda Torres
Published on December 12, 2019
