MEPS Virtual Workshop Registration Is Now Open

VIRTUAL MEPS Data Users’ Hand-on Workshop MEPS Workshop Registration is now open for the upcoming VIRTUAL MEPS Three-day Data Users' Workshop on March 29-21,2022. For registration and more information, visit the Workshops & Events page on the MEPS Web site at: https://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/about_meps/workshops_events.jsp.   For any other questions, please e-mail workshopinfo@ahrq.hhs.gov.

Graduate Writing Center

 Free help for graduate students and post-docs working on articles, proposals, posters and more.

https://www.uvm.edu/gradwriting

FW: National COVID Cohort Collaborative Outreach - TODAY

Hello Dr. Littenberg,

 

My name is Jonathan Emery and I am UVM's National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) research navigator. I have been tasked with reaching out to current COVID researchers at UVM to see if they would be interested in conducting research using N3C. 

 

The N3C data enclave is a centralized, secure, national clinical data resource with powerful analytics capabilities that the research community can use to study COVID-19, including potential risk factors, protective factors and long-term health consequences.

 

There is an engagement event being held tomorrow February 17th featuring N3C leadership and investigators to help demonstrate current research and capabilities of the N3C enclave.

 

More information can be found at the NCATS N3C landing page, including high level data overview and current projects. 

 

UVM has been uploading data to the N3C enclave throughout this past year, but has yet to begin data use and research. 

 

If you or anyone you know may be interested or has questions please reach out to me. 

 

Thank you!

Jonathan Emery

University of Vermont

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

National COVID Cohort Collaborative Navigator/Analyst 

jonathan.f.emery@uvm.edu (603) 986-6582

Oshita gets a WISH!

 

Congratulations to Jennifer Oshita, CCC-SLP, doctoral candidate in CTS. Jen was accepted to the American Physical Therapy Association's Workshop in Implementation Science and Health Services Research (WISH). The 3-day event will take place in Arlington, VA this May.

In praise of pre-prints, from The Economist Feb 5 2022

Scientific publishing - Economist Feb 5 2022

Summary: 

1) Preprints on the coronavirus have been impressively reliable
2) The case for publishing in expensive, restrictive scientific journals continues to weaken

SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING moves slowly. Depending on the academic field, it can take years for a single paper to get published in a well-regarded journal. In that time, a paper might undergo several rounds of peer-review by academic volunteers, followed by corrections—and possibly rejections—before a new scientific result sees the light of day.

This rigmarole is meant to ensure that the research that enters the scientific record is reputable, rigorous and trustworthy. That is admirable—and the system generally works well—but it also introduces a bottleneck, delaying the circulation of new scientific results. To get around this, scientists can release a “preprint”: a manuscript of a paper posted to a public server online before it has completed a formal peer-review process.

Preprints are commonplace in physics and mathematics. During the covid-19 pandemic, these publications took off in bio logy, genomics and medicine too, reflecting the urgency of communicating corona virus-related findings to other scientists, government officials, and the public.

Some have expressed concerns over the quality of preprints, however, arguing that publishing research prematurely risks undermining the integrity of science if conclusions may later need to be revised, after comments from peer-reviewers, say. Fortunately, a study published in the journal PLOS Biology this week suggests that they have little to worry about.

A team of researchers led by Jonathon Coates, a biologist at Queen Mary University in London, decided to analyse how reliable preprints were early in the covid-19 pandemic. They compiled a set of 184 research papers in the life sciences that had initially been posted as preprints on bio Rxiv and medRxiv—two large preprint servers—and later published in one of 23 major scientific journals in the first four months of the pandemic.

They compared each preprint with its more polished version that had later appeared in a journal. They looked for content that had been added or removed from the body of the manuscript, tables or figures that had been rearranged, and when key wording had been changed.

Dr Coates’s analysis found that 82.8% of coronavirus-related preprints and 92.8% of non-coronavirus-related preprints saw no material change to their conclusions upon journal publication. Of the changes that were made, most involved only strengthening or weakening of conclusions. Only one paper out of 184 saw one of its conclusions reversed. “This is a welcome finding,” says Dr Coates. “Ultimately, scientists share preprints because they think the work is ready, not simply to rush it out—the results of our study reflect that.”

That more coronavirus-related papers saw changes upon publication than non-coronavirus papers could reflect two factors, suggests Dr Coates. The first is that scientists were moving as quickly as possible to make coronavirus-related results public to aid the early pandemic response, meaning that the language in early covid-19 preprints was more likely to require a final edit. Dr Coates adds that, in his experience, journal editors were also being more rigorous in their treatment of early covid-19 research, precisely because the stakes were so high.

These findings support arguments made by advocates of “open science”, who say that new scientific results should be made available to other researchers and the public freely and quickly. Dr Coates’s work suggests that the usual gatekeepers of the research, scientific journals, may add little scientific value to the original research manuscripts. Their large subscription fees, therefore, look increasingly at odds with the value they provide.

Dr Coates also discovered an annoying wrinkle in the publishing and sharing of data in the life sciences. Whenever his team tried to gain access to the supplementary data for a journal-published version of an article, all too often the links were dead or did not lead to the data they were looking for. That seems troubling, not least during a public-health crisis in which access to timely data has been critical in working out what to do and when.

FW: New NHATS Online Course for Beginners

NHATS has created an online course for beginners, available through the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA).

 

This self-paced set of modules is designed for researchers who are learning to use The National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS). There is an optional module for learning to use the National Study of Caregiving (NSOC). 

 

The workshop is organized into three sections that take approximately 4-5 hours altogether to complete: Getting to know NHATS; Learning to use NHATS; and Using NHATS.

 
To register, please visit the NHATS website:  https://nhats.org/researcher/nhats/videos

 

Thank you,

The NHATS Team

Clinical Research Oriented Workshop (CROW) Meeting: Feb 10, 2022

 1.                   Warm Up: Proposals and pubs all progressing, plus faculty interviews at RMS; the challenges of staying on the cycle of editing/submission rather than cleaning the house!

2.                   Levi: Review manuscript titled “The impact of COVID-19 burden on functional health among adult primary care patients with multiple chronic conditions: a longitudinal study”  Not ready for cone of silence. We are looking for overall feedback. Any ideas on where to submit this?  Can you pick a section to focus on so we don’t get a bunch of feedback on intro/methods. Discussion probably needs the most work.

a.       Is it functional health (title) or what is used in the manuscript?  Why not just health?  Health status? Health outcomes?

b.       Journal: Consider JGIM

c.       Introduction: isn’t obvious that those that perceive Covid burden as heavier would have worse health status? How would this relate to the phenomenon of catastrophizing a difficult experience?

                                                   i.      There were multiple options for measuring burden; the personal questions were of most interest

                                                 ii.      How to intervene on burden – address in Discussion section

                                               iii.      Relevance is in the need to screen, address, treat, and follow up w MCC patients experiencing a pandemic

1.       Also, the need for patient initiated reach out for resources and care

                                               iv.      This is a descriptive piece: historical relevance when we don’t know the long term consequences of Covid.  In the future, we will need this baseline to understand the long term effects – supports future epidemiological understanding

d.       Methods

                                                   i.      “Follow up survey” refers to “Wave 4” – but this is a nonessential detail for the manuscript

                                                 ii.      Liked Table 1; recreate as a figure?

e.       Results

                                                   i.      Table 2: why multiple columns – is there an important difference among these Personal burden responses?  Bring these out

1.       Consider adding an “overall column” or “total N column”

2.       Or a Table 1 with a single column, and Table 2 for “Other Covid Indicators”

3.       “Don’t waste a Table 1 with a single column” is a good guide, but add the Total Column

f.        Discussion

                                                   i.      What a discussion section is for: critically analyze results, context of literature, strengths and limitations, take home message, other interesting findings, next step (maybe)

1.       Context: what we know and what we don’t know – relevance

2.       Reinforce the answer to the research question

                                                 ii.      Message: focus on the take home message – the value of this study epidemiologically in this historic bubble early into the pandemic

1.       There is validity to asking someone in the midst of a pandemic simple questions to assess their overall health

g.       Send your other comments in to Levi!

3.                   Next week:  TBD

Fwd: Save the Date - Virtual MEPS Data Users' Hands-on Workshop, March 29-31, 2022

VIRTUAL MEPS Data Users' Hand-on Workshop AHRQ will be conducting a virtual MEPS-HC Data Users' Workshop on March 29-31, 2022. This workshop will consist of lectures designed to provide a general overview of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) https://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/ along with lectures on MEPS-HC survey design, health care utilization, expenditures, medical conditions;  and statistical issues and challenges researchers face while analyzing MEPS-HC data. There will be three separate sessions in which sample SAS, STATA and R exercises will be demonstrated. A Q&A session is planned with each session to give participants an opportunity to ask questions pertaining to their specific research. Registration link and other important information will be available on February 18th  on: http://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/about_meps/workshops_events.jsp. For any other questions, please e-mail workshopinfo@ahrq.hhs.gov.

Benjamin Littenberg, MD
Henry and Carleen Tufo Professor of Medicine and Professor of Nursing
University of Vermont

New publication for Oshita

Congratulations to Jennifer Y. Oshita, CCC-SLP, doctoral candidate in CTS, and her team on the publication of their scoping review.

Douglas NF, Feuerstein JL, Oshita JY, Schliep ME, Danowski ML. Implementation Science Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders: A Scoping Review. Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2022 Feb 1:1-30. doi: 10.1044/2021_AJSLP-21-00126. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35104415.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to complete a scoping review of implementation science (IS) research in communication sciences and disorders (CSD) over time and to determine characteristics of IS research in CSD.

Method: A scoping review was conducted of PubMed and Education Resources Information Center for sources published in English that (a) included CSD practitioners, (b) addressed IS research, and (c) identified a specific evidence-based practice. Resulting sources were systematically examined for study aim, patient populations, implementation framework utilized, setting of the study, implementation strategy examined, and implementation outcome measured.

Results: The majority of the 82 studies that underwent a full-text review (80.5%) were published in 2014 or later. One fourth of the studies were concept papers, and another one fourth focused on context assessment (25.6% of studies, each), 11% focused on designing implementation strategies, and 36.6% focused on testing implementation strategies. The patient population most frequently represented aphasia (21.3%), and most studies (34.4%) were conducted in inpatient medical settings. Nearly half (42.6%) of the nonconcept studies lacked an IS framework. Among implementation strategies identified, approximately one third of studies focused on education and/or training plus another strategy and one fourth focused on education and/or training alone. Implementation outcomes measured typically represented early stages of implementation.

Conclusions: This scoping review of IS research in CSD described the landscape of IS studies in CSD. IS is intersecting with CSD at a rapid rate, especially since 2014. Future IS research in CSD should adopt an implementation framework a priori and consider the broad range of implementation strategies and outcomes to support the uptake of research into typical practice settings. 

 

Bonnell earns high honors from NAPCRG

Each year,  NAPCRG (the North American Primary Care Research Group) selects a handful of research presentations from their annual meeting for special recognition. This year, Levi Bonnell, MPH, CTS doctoral candidate, was an honoree.

Walking Habits During the COVID-19 Pandemic are Associated With Functional Health Among Primary Care Patients, has been selected as a 2021 NAPCRG Pearl. The Pearls are chosen each year by the Community Clinician Advisory Group (CCAG) as the top research studies having the greatest impact on clinical practice as presented at the NAPCRG Annual Conference. Members of the CCAG present the Pearls at local, regional, and national venues.