Medical Students Join DFM Faculty on Summer Research Projects

Please welcome the medical students to the Department of Family Medicine Summer Student Research and Clinical Assistantship! Eight medical students began work with DFM faculty on May 31on a variety of research projects relating to Family Medicine. They will be conducting their research and shadowing their physician mentors in DFM clinics through Friday, July 20.

• Sara Hoffman is working with Sarina Schrager, MD to conduct a survey of women of childbearing age who are waiting to visit with their DFM health care provider. They are interested in pursuing information about why, with the availability of contraceptive methods today, half of all pregnancies are still unintended. Sara and Dr. Schrager will ask about their knowledge of the various methods of available contraception, and about their attitudes toward the most common contraceptive methods.
  
  
• Sarah Allen is joining Anne Eglash MD, of the DFM Mount Horeb Clinic, to collect breast milk samples from lactating women and to develop reliable techniques to grow and identify bacteria and yeast from breast milk cultures. They will compare rates of bacterial and yeast growth from breast milk among lactating women with and without chronic pain. They are working in conjunction with Richard A. Proctor, MD, and Carol A. Spiegel, PhD of the Department of Medicine.
  
  
• Matt Hinderaker is working on a Nationwide Family Medicine International Adoption Clinical Practice Survey with Jon Temte, MD, PhD and third year Madison resident Kristin Lerberg, MD. They are doing this survey to determine the interest and comfort levels of family physicians throughout the United States in providing comprehensive health care to children, who were adopted internationally, and their families.
  
  
• Amy Bamber and David Rabago, MD hope to determine physician awareness of Nasal Irrigation (NI) as a therapy for rhinosinusitis, the extent to which physicians use NI in their practice, and physician satisfaction with NI. They will develop a web based survey to send to 180 Wisconsin Physicians who are part of the WREN network this summer.
  
  
• Ann Regnery will perform a retrospective chart review for 600 adult patients who have been diagnosed in an outpatient clinic with pneumonia, acute bronchitis, or lower respiratory tract infection. She is working with Dennis Baumgardner, MD and Jennifer Evertsen, MS at the Milwaukee Campus. They intend to evaluate both the criteria used by primary care physicians to empirically diagnose pneumonia and the criteria they use to order a chest radiograph to rule-out pneumonia.
  
  
• Elizabeth Doherty will work with Jon Temte, MD, PhD to conduct a pilot study to better define the relationships between:
  • encounter problem density during primary care visits (number of problems presented per visit),
  • clinician mental workload,
  • physician's estimates of medical error, and
  • quality indicators.

  They will work with 30 physicians from the WREN network across the state.

• Alexis Eastman, Bruce Barrett, MD, PhD, and Jon Temte, MD, PhD will use more than a decade of viral epidemiology data, collected by the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, to better characterize acute respiratory tract infections with known viral causes to answer such questions as:
  • What are the predominant viral pathogens associated with upper respiratory infection in the State of Wisconsin?
  • What are the seasonal patterns?
  • How much do they fluctuate?

• Anna Graupner and Jennifer Eddy, MD of Eau Claire will work with State and county public health agencies, public health, hospitals, and schools to assemble the most recent and accurate statistics regarding the costs, prevalence and effects of underage drinking in Eau Claire County. This initiative will provide local policymakers with accurate statistics as well as inform them about which approaches have been shown to be most successful in addressing this problem.