Clinical

The OHSU Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM) was established as the country's third independent academic emergency medicine unit in 1977 and achieved full departmental status in 1992. The ED is a Level I Trauma Center with 42 patient care rooms, over 47,000 visits per year and 1,500 to 2,000 trauma system entries per year. The DEM has a fully accredited three-year residency program as well as formal postgraduate fellowships in health services research, health care education, pediatric emergency medicine, ultrasound, and toxicology.

Leadership

OHSU faculty members have served as presidents of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), and the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM). OHSU faculty currently serve on multiple committees and task forces for SAEM, ACEP, the American Board of Medical Specialties, the National Association of EMS Physicians, the AMA Section Council on Emergency Medicine, the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, the American College of Medical Toxicology, the American Heart Association, the ED Benchmarking Alliance, and the Oregon Medical Association. The influence of OHSU Emergency Medicine faculty extends outside of the field of emergency medicine with faculty members serving in the Institute of Medicine, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Research

The OHSU Department of Emergency Medicine is a leading EM research center. OHSU DEM ranked #3 nationally among academic ED programs for NIH funding in 2015. Multiple OHSU DEM faculty lead federally funded research and serve as study section reviewers for the NIH, AHRQ, and PCORI. OHSU participates in several NIH clinical trials networks, which support studies of cardiac arrest, major trauma, neurologic emergencies, and acute lung injury. OHSU DEM is one of six sites that has been awarded an NIH institutional training award (K12) to develop acute care research faculty. Current federally funded projects include: a nationwide study of trauma care systems; an evaluation of a Medicaid transformation program in Oregon; a multisite effort to develop novel evaluation algorithms for syncope; an efficacy assessment of Prescription Monitoring Program use in EDs; and a mixed-methods study of best hospital practices to reduce ED crowding. Faculty have particular expertise in outcomes research, health policy, and advanced statistical methods.

OHSU DEM contains two research centers of excellence. The Center for Policy Research in Emergency Medicine (CPR-EM) includes seven core faculty members who have a specific focus on emergency medicine health services research. The Center for Health Systems Effectiveness (CHSE) is led by OHSU faculty and aims to deliver data-driven health policy analyses of local and national importance. CHSE has a quantitative focus with particular strengths in statistical and econometric methods.

Fellows will have access to a highly developed research infrastructure, including over 20 staff who provide support for IRB applications, grant proposals, programming, statistics, budget management, and project management. The Clinical Research Investigative Studies Program (CRISP) is research volunteer program that provides prospective research enrollment support 16 hours per day, 365 days per year. CRISP staff have enrolled nearly 10,000 patients for 55 studies. Fellows will also have the opportunity to pursue formal didactic training and obtain a Master of Clinical Research or Master of Public Health degree.