The residency's research: the Fort Wayne Medical Education Program

The family medicine residency's scholarly record

Research aimed at the city's own health: The smallest of Fort Wayne's research houses is its family medicine residency. The Fort Wayne Medical Education Program — the community's family medicine residency, based on Broadway — treats scholarly activity as part of clinical training, with a director of research and scholarly activity, statistical support, and projects required to be community-based and aimed at the health of the Fort Wayne population, especially its vulnerable and underserved. Its documented output is peer-reviewed and local in subject: the program's faculty and residents, with the Fort Wayne–Allen County Department of Health, published a file review of all 418 overdose deaths in Allen County between 2008 and 2015 — "Who Is Overdosing?" (2017) — the county's own epidemic measured by its own physicians, in a national journal of health services research. The program's residents present and win at the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians' statewide Research Day, in original research and performance-improvement categories, year over year. It is research at residency scale — no institute, no endowment — and it closes this section where Fort Wayne's advancement record in fact lives: distributed among a wire works, two hospital systems, a medical school campus, a pharmacy school, and the physicians the city trains.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Medical Education Program, Research & Scholarly Activity page — scholarly activity as an integral part of training; community-based, interprofessional projects directed at the Fort Wayne population, especially the vulnerable and underserved; the director of research and scholarly activity; IAFP Research Day awards in original research and performance improvement.
2. Eigner, Henriksen, Huynh, Murphy, Brubaker, Sanders and McMahan, "Who Is Overdosing? An Updated Picture of Overdose Deaths From 2008 to 2015," Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology 4 (2017) — the Fort Wayne Medical Education Program and Fort Wayne–Allen County Department of Health authors' review of 418 Allen County overdose deaths from coroner's and state records.