Vicki Wickman, a registered nurse with a masters degree in business administration, is ready to help MUSC’s General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) focus on its mission, achieve its goals and enhance its services.

Wickman, who joined MUSC two years ago leaving a position in service line management at a three-hospital system in Michigan, comes to the GCRC from managing medical and surgical oncology and bone marrow transplant patient care services of MUSC.

At the GCRC, which is a National Institutes of Health clinical research facility duplicated in medical centers throughout the country, Wickman’s job is to “...do what we can to make our principal investigators’ work go better. They are our customers,” she said.

To serve the special needs of clinical investigators, the GCRC has its own diet kitchen, laboratories and outpatient facilities separate from those serving the entire hospital. The center also has access to all the services MUSC has to offer, such as physical and occupational therapies, x-ray, electrocardiography, social services and chaplain service.

The mission statement of the GCRC is: To enable the performance of clinical research by providing investigators with the optimal support to design, initiate, complete and report data from patient-based investigation.

“And we have a capacity to grow in terms of studies and support,” Wickman said. She referred to a recent survey of principal investigators seeking their observations of the center’s strengths and weaknesses and their recommendations for improvement. “We’ve commissioned task forces to address their recommendations and we encourage feedback.”

Wickman sees a program of continuous improvement and innovation in GCRC inpatient and outpatient services as a means to bolster flagging patient day numbers. Just as the average length of a patient’s stay in the hospital has shortened due to the influence of managed care, outpatient services, and improved health care delivery, the average GCRC inpatient stay has shortened as well. Consequently, the GCRC needs to increase the number of research projects it services to maintain a level of patient days in its seven-bed unit consistent with NIH requirements.

“Patients used to stay anywhere from a week to a month,” Wickman said. “Now it’s down to three days on average.”

The GCRC provides training and assistance in writing clinical research grants, educates and supports investigators in data collection and systems management. Also, plans are being considered to move GCRC inpatient and outpatient services to a combined unit to enhance efficiency.