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PA program collects health data statewide

by Dick Peterson
Public Relations
To listen to physician assistant program director Paul Jacques and Chip Taylor, Ph.D., in the College of Health Professions, you’d think they’ve struck gold in South Carolina, and in a way, they have. Their gold is the health data of thousands of patients in doctors’ offices scattered throughout the state.
 
And they’ve found a way to mine it.
 
Each year their physician assistant students serve rotations in doctors’ offices statewide where they see the practical, clinical side of their chosen career. There they take patient histories, perform physicals, talk to patients about preventive medicine issues, develop disease management plans, and discuss individual cases with their preceptor—usually a physician.
 
For Jacques and Taylor, that’s gold. The demographic information passing through those offices daily is an invaluable resource in a quest to develop effective treatments and therapies designed specifically for the individual patient.
 
Paul Jacques
“They collect data from every patient they see,” Jacques said. “Last year we had 46 students collecting information on such things as ethnicity, age, and other categories along with patient diagnoses. This helps us make sure the information in our curriculum reflects what they’re seeing out there. That’s 46 students seeing patients with their preceptors over a five-week period. From the first rotation, we have demographics on about 6,000 patients that reflect the health of South Carolinians.”
 
Driving their students’ interest in collecting the health information is an emerging emphasis on biomedical and clinical research and the immediate benefits recent research findings can have for the patient in the examining room. As the PA program grew from a bachelor’s to a master’s, Taylor said, a course in critical evaluation of medical literature was accompanied by a study of research methodology, asking: What’s research all about? and What are the parameters in developing research?
 
The critical evaluation of medical literature course now includes instruction on using evidence-based medicine and the course on research methodology includes how the practicing scientist does research and data collection.   
 
Dr. Chip Taylor

 “We’re trying to foster an environment where students are thinking about research and its application to patients when they walk through the door of an examining room,” Taylor said.
 
Such an awareness of research procedures and its direct benefits in patient care help the PA students with their patient health data collection and with locating information beneficial to the patient the physician is seeing at the moment.
 
Training in the critical evaluation of medical literature gives them an understanding of evidence-based medicine, Jacques said. With that skill, the PA in the doctor’s office can be searching the medical literature and bringing information on the latest proven therapies to the doctor’s attention.
 
In the environment of collecting patient health data and retrieving the latest disease specific information on patient care, the PA students have another benefit: “They can base their research projects on the demographic variables they encounter,” Taylor said.

Special software facilitates data collection

Essential to the efficient and accurate collection of data from clinic sites across the state is the trim, but powerful, Palm Pilot physician assistant students use when interviewing patients, taking their histories and entering diagnoses.
 
Dr. Reamer Bushardt

But even the ubiquitous Palm Pilot wouldn’t be up to the task were it not for the specially designed software developed in the PA program office by Reamer Bushardt, Pharm.D., a certified physician assistant, and Chip Taylor, Ph.D.
 
“We wanted to produce a database that was easy to use, had the essential basic information we wanted to collect and one that presented the information in a way that people could see a profile of health care outcomes across South Carolina,” Bushardt said. “But no pre-manufactured software was exactly what we needed.”
 
Bushardt and Taylor, with the help of PA program director Paul Jacques, a certified physician assistant, and support from a Health Resources and Services Administration grant, worked with the developers of HanDBase software to create the right fit to turn the Palm Pilot into the perfect data collection tool.

Paul Jacques demonstrates the ease with which his Palm Pilot can record health data during a patient visit.

“I’m no computer software expert,” Bushardt said, “but I do use computers and I have an idea of what they can do.” He said that the re-engineered software he helped develop supports information gathering which highlights focused areas from the Healthy People 2010 Initiative. From it PA students can produce data that reflects the outcomes of treatments, disease prevention measures and health education initiatives.

“Reamer is the brainchild to bring us the software that will gather information from the patient population to see how they measure up to Healthy People 2010,” Jacques said. “The best decisions are made with the most information, and this packages information so people can comprehend it and apply it to life.”
 
Jacques said that he began developing a data collection system using palm pilots about two and a half years ago, but Bushardt and Taylor have taken it to the next level.
   

Friday, July 8, 2005
Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to petersnd@musc.edu or catalyst@musc.edu. To place an ad in The Catalyst hardcopy, call Community Press at 849-1778.