UB Surgical Outcomes and Research (SOAR)
SOAR
UB Surgical Outcomes And Research (UB SOAR) Center was established in 2017 as a collaboration between the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences' Department of Surgery and UB's School of Public Health and Health Professions.
Currently UB SOAR serves as hub for several surgery-centered research programs including research on obesity and bariatric outcomes, surgical oncology care delivery and outcomes research, trauma outcomes research, and transplant outcomes program. These programs jointly resulted in numerous publications and presentations at leading national research conference and have generated nearly $4 million dollars in research funding. In addition, UB SOAR provides research training and mentoring to a broad spectrum of UB trainees interested in careers in surgery including undergraduate, graduate (MPH, MS and PhD), clinical and research fellows and postdocs, and junior faculty (19 surgical trainees total since 2017).
UB SOAR training activities have been in part supported by NYS DOH-funded Center Grant for the Buffalo General Hospital, the Empire Clinical Research Investigator Program (ECRIP). The goal of this training program is to promote development of new clinical researchers, provide seed funding for future center grants and support a broad spectrum of research activities around the Center’s theme. The goal falls directly in line with the mission of Kaleida Health to advance the health of our community. Furthermore, this Center’s aim is synchronous with Kaleida Health’s vision “to provide compassionate, high-value, quality care, improving health in Western New York and beyond.”
Training new generation of clinician leaders is one of the core priorities for UB and Kaleida Health. Clinical research skills is the fundamental tool set for academic physicians of the future. UB SOAR draws from research and mentorship expertise across multiple UB Schools and Centers including Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Science, School of Public Health and Health Professions, Institute for Healthcare Informatics, the Clinical and Translational Research Center, Schools of Engineering and Social Work and College of Arts and Sciences.
The MPH and MS programs provide trainees with the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to work in health care delivery, public health, health insurance and other public and private healthcare and industry settings to inform population health programs, evaluate provider quality and impact of healthcare interventions, and assess organizational performance and patient outcomes.
Health Services Delivery and Administration is a quickly growing multidisciplinary field that includes management, finance, behavioral services, informatics, analytics, patient engagement and many other professional and research areas. Additional workshops, consultations and certificate programs are available to clinical trainees to accommodate their busy schedules and specific research interests.
Training Surgical Skills
To enhance surgical training, new virtual skills trainers are being developed for tasks ranging from fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery to camera navigation and advanced suturing. We have been collaborating on the development and validation of these devices. In particular, in collaboration with Kitware, Inc, we are investigating the use of simulators to support surgeons in the practice of responding to adverse and rare events to improve skill proficiency and resilience.
Surgical Skill Assessment
Systematic and objective evaluation and feedback are crucial for effective training of psychomotor skills involved in point-of-injury care and hospital-based medicine (HBM). Our team has been conducting two large-scale projects, funded by the U.S. Army and in collaboration with RPI and FSU-FAMU, on the use of brain-based and video-based metrics for evaluating skill on laparoscopic suturing and on prolonged field care tasks (endotracheal intubation and cricothyrotomy). Our current studies will be able to show the benefits and limitations of these metrics relative to other measurement modalities for the classification of experts versus novices and how brain activation as individuals train and gain skill on the task. These outcomes will inform training programs, and surgeon and Army medic credentialing standards.
Mental Imagery
Non-invasive functional neuroimaging during surgical tasks has been explored as an objective assessment tool. Our group was the first to monitor brain activity during Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) tasks and demonstrated that neuroimaging data can reliably discriminate between novice and expert performance. However, brain activity during cognitive surgical tasks has not yet been examined. Our overall goal is to develop a neuroimaging methodology for the objective evaluation of cognitive surgical tasks.