Research

Faculty in Hospital Medicine Division are actively involved in research and other forms of scholarship that move the fields of medical education, quality improvement, and health services forward. 

• Lisa Beyers, MD
  Dr. Beyers’ interests include initiatives to improve the quality of hospital care for patients with end-stage liver disease and complications of cirrhosis.
• Amy Blatt, MD
  Dr. Blatt’s scholarship has focused on trainee assessment/evaluation, UME to GME transitions, and optimizing the clinical learning environment.
• John Grable, MD, PhD
  Dr. Grable’s research interest is in developing an inpatient tobacco treatment program, the Rochester Model. Most inpatient tobacco treatment programs hire specialized staff and are expensive to operate. The Rochester program uses existing staff nurses, physicians, mid-level providers, clerks and medical students to counsel patients while hospitalized and continue the treatments after discharge, and it is showing robust quit rates at a very low cost.
• Ashley Jenkins, MD, MS
  Dr. Jenkins’ broad interest is to enable equitable healthcare access and delivery for youth and adults with childhood-onset conditions. As a med-peds hospitalist, her current focus and associated grant funding has been on building and leveraging collaborative and patient-inclusive teams to improve inpatient care for people with sickle cell disease by adapting and implementing evidence-informed interventions. Her hope is that this work will provide a foundation to improve hospital care for other marginalized populations of all ages.
• Valerie Lang, MD, MHPE
  Dr. Lang’s research focuses on medical education and faculty development. Her work explores curriculum development and evaluation, assessment of clinical reasoning, and professional identity formation among academic hospitalists.
• Alec O’Connor, MD, MPH
  Dr. O’Connor’s educational scholarship explores current topics relevant to residency education, including program director burnout, program director awareness of residents’ experiences of bias and discrimination, training in allyship, and the shift to a virtual recruitment process during and after the pandemic.
• Mical Raz, MD, PhD
  Dr. Raz teaches courses related to health policy and politics in the University of Rochester Program for Public Health Related Majors, and her research focuses on the child welfare system. Her new project is a political history of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997). She is also involved in a project examining the legacy of racism within URMC and its historical roots. 
• David Staudt, MD
  Dr. Staudt’s research focuses on evaluating novel curriculum integrating point of care ultrasound (POCUS) into medical student education. 
• Meghan Train, DO
  Dr. Train’s interests focus on medical education and quality improvement in the internal medicine residency and at the university of richest school of medicine and dentistry.  Her focus on high value care, quality improvement and patient safety. A few of her current quality improvement initiatives include screening for food insecurity in hospitalized adult patients, reduction in unnecessary lab work, and increase in naloxone prescribing at the time of hospital discharge.