Emergency Medicine
In 2005, there were 115 million visits to emergency rooms in the US. This amounts to nearly 40 visits for every 100 persons. The average length of time a patient will spend in the emergency room is over three hours. The number of emergency room visits has increased steadily as more and more Americans who lack health insurance are unwilling to seek treatment for a condition until it has progressed to a life-threatening and painful stage. Emergency medical care facilities are increasingly challenged to meet the demands placed on their services.
The Emergency Department at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) has been seeking solutions to the challenges of emergency medical care for decades. A tradition of medical innovation has helped HCMC earn the reputation as one of the best emergency medicine centers in the US.
Central to HCMC’s tradition of innovation is the goal of improving patient care for those requiring emergency medical care. James Miner, MD, FACEP, and HCMC physician, conducts research on emergency medicine at MMRF. His research focuses on the assessment and treatment of acute pain.
Dr. Miner’s research objective is two-part. First, he wants to improve the safety with which pain medication is administered. Second, he wants to explore the common factors that cause disparities in how pain medication is administered.
Pain is often under-treated for many trauma patients and the critically ill, even though this aspect of their treatment is often the most important to them. Modern medicine’s understanding and treatment of pain in the acutely ill is much less sophisticated than other aspects of their medical care.
He has found that there are significant disparities in how pain medication is administered to different ethnic populations. The disparities are most significant for minority ethnic groups. Intriguingly, these ethnic group disparities vary throughout the country. Dr. Miner suspects that this may stem from medical staffs’ familiarity or lack of familiarity with different languages and cultures.
To improve pain management, Dr. Miner is developing pain assessment protocols to be used by care providers when they are treating patients’ pain. He has also created sophisticated pain management guidelines to help identify patients most likely to have their pain under-treated.
Dr. Miner wants to design a translational research project that would allow him to take the results of his research on pain management and apply them directly to improving patient care. He says HCMC is a great place to conduct this type of research. HCMC’s patient population is large and diverse, but not so large that you can’t track patients as they receive medical care in the system.
He is seeking funding from the National Institutes of Health and private industry to advance his work. However, he is hoping to also gain funding through philanthropy so that he can research pain management in poor and vulnerable populations - populations often underserved by industry-funded medical research.
