-
Over the past decade, the Internet has become an invaluable tool for researchers, linking colleagues across nations or even continents and enabling huge amounts of data to be transmitted quickly and securely. It even makes applying to IRBs faster and (well, relatively) painless.
-
IRBs and research institutions occasionally should revisit their conflict of interest policies and update them to make certain they effectively protect human subjects, as well as pass the "smell" test.
-
It might take an individual IRB member from six months to a year to become fully acclimated to participating on an ethics board. So research institutions should do what they can to improve both new IRB member orientation and continuing education and training.
-
-
When Sarah Fowler-Dixon, PhD, an education specialist in Washington University's Human Research Protection Office, began a project to develop the university's Internet research guideline for the university, she gathered a task force of IRB members, investigators involved in Internet research, and a technical advisor to help work through the complicated security issues involved.
-
Videography can be a useful data collection tool in research, giving researchers access to information records of events, subtle non-verbal cues that can't be elicited any other way.
-
When a Boston, MA, research team decided to study HIV/AIDS prevention among the mentally ill, a group that is particularly vulnerable to infection with the disease, they had to ensure their research volunteers were recruited with appropriate privacy safeguards and thoroughly understood their research participation.
-
The ED at Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Ranson, WV, has reduced its rate of patients who leave without being seen (LWBS) by 50% with the addition of a mobile unit located immediately outside the main department.
-
A new process for handlings calls from primary care physicians not only has improved ED communications at Doctors Hospital in Columbus, OH, but it also has boosted relations with family physicians in the community thanks in no small part to a 30-minute guarantee offered for those doctors' patients.
-
In 1999, "ER One," a high-tech ED designed for optimal response to mass casualty events, was just a gleam in the eye of Mark Smith, MD, FACEP, chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Washington (DC) Hospital Center.
