Grant Writing Resources—Department of Healthcare Policy and Research
December 15, 2014
Department of Healthcare Policy and Research at Weill Cornell Medical College
The Department of Healthcare Policy and Research is a new department at Weill Cornell that has been formed to evaluate and inform the changing healthcare system and be a hub of discovery. Its faculty focus on a variety of projects related to key healthcare policy and delivery topics, developing and spreading critical evidence that can be used to improve healthcare. We pursue this mission through innovative research, education and service. Our faculty members have substantial research strengths across a variety of areas including health care policy and economics, data analytics and informatics, and comparative effectiveness and health outcomes research. Their innovative, quantitative and qualitative research addresses questions of the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and comparative effectiveness of various health care interventions and delivery models. The department is organized into five divisions:
Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
The Division supports design and analysis of a variety of clinical and translational research projects at the medical college and serves as an academic home for biostatistics and epidemiology. It also initiates original epidemiologic studies and develops novel statistical research methods. Division personnel train students, faculty, and staff in the medical college and affiliated institutions in statistical and epidemiological methodology and software.
Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Outcomes Research
The Division pursues comparative effectiveness and outcomes research related to medications, medical devices, procedures, and healthcare delivery interventions. Faculty and staff in the division have advanced training in health services research and decision science methods, and work collaboratively with clinical researchers who have expertise in a variety of medical and surgical specialties.
Division of Health Policy and Economics
The Division focuses on organization, payment methods, and processes to improve quality and control costs in health care. We ask: what types of organization, with what types of incentives, using what types of process, improve health care? We study the evolution of changes in the organization of physician practices, hospitals, and nursing homes, of changes in processes used to improve care, and of changes in incentive methods such as pay for performance and public reporting. We pay special attention to racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities and to unintended consequences of incentive policies.
Division of Health Informatics
This Division pursues research, education, service and innovation in informatics to improve quality and value in healthcare. Division faculty have expertise in the use and effects of information technology in healthcare, such as adoption, usability, fit, utility, generalizability, scalability or sustainability, and in the intelligent use of data to inform policy and decision making, such as applications of data mining, machine learning or analytics.
Division of Health Systems Innovation and Implementation Science
This Division will focus on the development, implementation, and evaluation of patient-centered clinical innovations within the Weill Cornell Medical College/New York Presbyterian Hospital system and, as appropriate, in regional and national settings. Innovations will center on improving the value of healthcare delivery.
Office Space/Conferencing Facilities
In March 2009, the Department of Public Health (now the Department of Healthcare Policy and Research) moved its administrative offices to a new facility at 402 East 67th Street. The Department has three floors of office space at this location, which includes state-of-the-art technology for video- and teleconferencing in four conference rooms. Available equipment includes: Audio systems with bridge-line conferencing, HD flat panel monitors, Video conferencing systems, Telephone conferencing, Computer interfaces (wireless and wired network & local drive), DVD recorders, Touch-panel control systems, HD Projectors, HD Video conferencing, DVD players/recorders, Wireless microphones and lecterns for presenters/Ceiling microphone arrays for audience, HD flat panel monitors.
The Department of Healthcare Policy and Research also has office space at 425 East 61st Street, on the third floor. The Division of Comparative Effectiveness and Outcomes Research and the Division of Health Informatics are housed at this location.
Computer Resources:
The Weill Medical College Information Technologies and Services Department provides maintenance for the computational resources of the Department of Healthcare Policy and Research. Department faculty and staff are each equipped with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office Professional software, all of which are networked to both the departmental server and the college-wide network. Researchers are provided with statistical software packages such as Stata, SPSS-X and SAS. Computers are linked to either individual printers or network printers. A Xerox photocopying machine with color printing and scanning capability is also available. A state-of-the-art, high-speed research workstation is located on-site and is available to all researchers with links to our departmental server and statistical software. Digital duplicating equipment is providing on-site in departmental space with additional state-of-the-art duplicating capabilities provided by the College Office of Medical Art and Photography.
As a result of our telecommunication linkup with the medical college's mainframe and Academic Computing Services, research and administrative staff at the department have access to a host of online library resources. Research faculty are also eligible for 25 GB of free space on the Medical College’s Office of Research and Sponsored Projects (RASP) server.
The medical college can access mainframes housed in Ithaca, NY, including the very secure and sophisticated computing system at Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER). Computation facilities at the main campus include an HP 9000 750 with HP/UX operating system and an IBM 3090 Virtual Machine with an MVS/XP operating system. Cornell has two IBM Sp1 supercomputers with large vectoring capacity for complex algorithms and matrix algebra (useful for structural equation modeling with large datasets). Electronic storage is provided by IBM magnetic tape readers for 6250 and 1600 BPI tapes as well as 9 track cartridge readers for compressed data storage.
Other Medical College and Affiliated Resources:
New York City Clinical Data Research Network (NYC-CDRN)
The New York City Clinical Data Research Network (NYC-CDRN), funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) for $7 million, is led by Weill Cornell Medical College (PI Dr. Rainu Kaushal). The NYC-CDRN is a collaboration of 22 healthcare organizations in New York City that is collecting and sharing de-identified electronic clinical data for research and population health activities. This data is available for researchers in the member institutions for conducting patient-centered research.
Library Resources:
Among the many information resources available to WMC students and faculty are the Samuel J. Wood Library and the C.V. Starr Biomedical Information Center. The library houses over 1,500 printed journals, over 4,800 electronic journals, and over 150,000 archived volumes. The library is fully automated, featuring computer terminals that provide access to library collections from any networked computer and student workstation throughout the College. In addition, the Nathan Cummings Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Hospital for Special Surgery, The Rockefeller University and Cornell University in Ithaca collaborate to share databases, journals, and resources, effectively expanding access to available information. The library offers a variety of services, including computer -generated literature searches, translations, and inter-library loans. Medical graphics and photographic/audiovisual facilities provide a wide range of art, photographic, and audio-visual services.
Clinical and Translational Science Center
The Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC) addresses the necessity of an integrated, comprehensive research support system that includes education, training and mentoring for clinical research investigators, coordinators and staff. The mission of the CTSC is to provide an environment that allows optimal use of our considerable multi-institutional assets and the diversity of our patient population to move translational research seamlessly from bench to bedside and to the community. The CTSC acts as a conduit through which essential resources, technological tools and education programs for all partners can be efficiently shared and managed.
Integral to Weill Cornell's Strategic Plan for Research, which was initiated seven years ago, the plan for the CTSC brought to fruition the integration of existing inter-institutional resources among neighbors on York Avenue and partner institutions in the immediate area. The resulting cluster of East Side institutions forms a unique and cohesive biomedical complex fulfilling the NIH roadmap initiative of breaking down institutional silos and barriers separating scientific disciplines to accelerate the clinical application of basic science discoveries.
This center is funded through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs), a national consortium that is transforming how clinical and translational research is conducted. For more information about the national CTSA consortium please visit ctsaweb.org.
Hospital Affiliation--NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital:
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is a 2,224 bed university teaching hospital based in New York City, jointly serving Weill Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. The Hospital provides state-of-the-art inpatient, ambulatory and preventive care in all areas of medicine at five major centers: Weill Medical College, Columbia University Medical Center in Northern Manhattan, Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian in Washington Heights and on the Upper East Side, the Allen Pavilion in the community of Inwood Manhattan, and the Westchester Division in White Plains, NY. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is the largest hospital in New York. The Hospital employs over 5,080 physicians holding faculty appointments at one or both medical schools and more than 14,700 non-physician healthcare providers and hospital employees. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is one of the most comprehensive health care institutions in the world, offering the latest advances in medical and computer technology to help ensure high quality, efficient, and cost-effective healthcare.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is also the flagship hospital of an extensive healthcare network, which consists of more than 150 participating organizations including 32 hospitals, 6 long-term care facilities, 12 home health agencies, 3 specialty institutes, and 97 ambulatory care centers. Through the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare Network, the Hospital and its affiliates provide the most comprehensive, high quality services to residents of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, as well as Westchester, Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut and several upstate
New York counties. More than 12,000 attending physicians provide care in the System. Each System member is an affiliate of either Weill Medical College or Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.