Research Programs

The research mission of the Section of Hospital Medicine is to generate knowledge that can inform the processes and delivery of healthcare in order to improve the health of our patients. To advance this mission faculty and staff in the Section of Hospital Medicine engage in research in a variety of settings, including in the acute care hospital, outpatient clinics, and in the community. Our faculty and staff have expertise in utilizing nationally representative claims databases, and we are members of different national research consortia and actively partner with other academic medical centers and community hospitals to lead and participate in research studies and trials.

Our research program supports and includes a range of observational studies and clinical trials that span  translational medicine spectrum. This includes studies that collect and utilize patient-reported data, administrative records data, clinical EHR data, local and national (including Medicare) claims data, genomic sequencing data, and other clinical biomarkers. Our Section helps to integrate these data sources and support researchers working across this spectrum.

Additionally, a  major focus of our research program concerns the role of providers and systems level factors in affecting the quality, outcomes, and cost of care with health system-level interventions. Among these are the Comprehensive Care Program that focuses on Medicare patients at high-risk of hospitalization and the Oral Health project, which studies the effects of offering no-fee basic dental care to older adults.

Our longest standing research program in the Section is the Hospitalist Project, which leverages in-person and phone interviews with hospitalized patients to measure the quality of care and health outcomes on the general medicine services at UChicago Medicine. Since the Hospitalist Project launched in 1997, we have recruited over 74,000 patients to participate in the study representing over 170,000 unique encounters. As a research infrastructure, the Hospitalist Project has also helped pilot early-stage research studies, recruit participants into these studies, and provide training opportunities to early-career investigators at all levels.

Our Section offers research training opportunities at all levels, from undergraduate students and medical students to postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty. We benefit strongly from the Section’s connection to the Center for Health and the Social Sciences(CHeSS), a university-wide center devoted to promoting collaborative research and training at the Interface of health and the social sciences, which supports the administration of many of these training activities. We are also fortunate to have developed close collaborative relationships with researchers throughout the Biological Sciences Division, Social Sciences Division, and related professional schools.

Our research has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the George E. Richmond Foundation, and a number of other public and private sources. Several of our research collaborations, such as those through the Chicago Area Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network (CAPriCORN) and the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), have also given us valuable opportunities to participate in local and/or national research networks. We are also grateful for the generous gifts to our programs from alumni, patients, and other friends.

Learn more about some of our ongoing research programs here: