Dr. James is the Executive Director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Research and Vice President – Chief Quality Officer, Medical Research and Continuing Medical Education. For more than 20 years, Dr. James has championed the standardization of clinical care through data collection and analysis on a wide variety of treatment protocols and complex care processes. Dr. James is devoted to using quality improvement tools to better understand the cause and effect relationship between various practice and environmental factors. “We developed the mini Advanced Training Program (miniATP) in response to the growing need to provide practical, in-depth training to healthcare professionals from Intermountain and across the country and indeed the world, who teach, implement and investigate quality improvement, outcome measurement and management, of both clinical and non-clinical processes,” says Dr James.

• Research Contracts - Whitney Weaver, JD, Intermountain Healthcare’s Senior Contracts Manager, shared progress being made with regard to streamlining the contracts process and improving transparency into the new process. Contracts are required when Intermountain researchers work with outside entities to conduct studies.
• Pre-Award Office – Brad Isaacson, PhD, MBA, MSF, a research initiatives manager at Intermountain Healthcare, described the shortfalls associated with how research grants were historically submitted. Taking lessons from the miniATP course, Dr. Isaacson and his team were able to develop a pre-award office, designed to support investigators from across Intermountain with each step in writing and submitting research proposals for external funding.
• Institutional Review Board (IRB) – Shelby Moench, Intermountain Healthcare’s IRB Administrator discussed her team’s progress, using tools from miniATP, toward improving transparency of the IRB processes. The purpose of the IRB is to assure and facilitate the ethical conduct of biomedical research involving human subjects. Intermountain’s IRB reviews proposed research protocols as well as protocols involving human biological material and protected health information.

Intermountain Healthcare’s Office of Research is grateful for opportunities to participate in Dr. James’ training sessions, which will benefit the services we provide to investigators across the healthcare system, ultimately resulting in better care for our patients.

Intermountain currently has more than 1,500 active research studies in more than 20 clinical areas. The core of Intermountain research takes place within our 10 clinical programs: Behavioral Health, Cardiovascular, Intensive Medicine, Musculoskeletal, Neurosciences, Oncology, Pediatrics, Primary Care, Surgical Services, and Women & Newborns.

To find out more about Intermountain Healthcare Research and the advancement of medical knowledge in many clinical areas visit intermountainresearch.org