Dr. Harrington to Deliver SCAI 2015 Hildner Lecture on Future of Clinical Research

January 5, 2015—The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI) announced that Robert Harrington, MD, will deliver the annual Hildner lecture at the SCAI 2015 scientific sessions in San Diego, California, on May 6–9, 2015. The lecture entitled “The Future of Clinical Research in Interventional Cardiology: Challenges and Opportunities” will be delivered on Friday, May 8, and will highlight the critical need for more clinical research in interventional cardiology. In the lecture, Dr. Harrington will argue that simplification of larger trials, better early phase investigations, and the use of electronic health records can ease the path to new research.

Dr. Harrington, a Fellow of SCAI, is currently Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. He is an internationally recognized expert in clinical research, having led the world’s largest academic clinical research organization, Duke Clinical Research Institute. During his 5 years in this role, his more than 200 faculty and 1,200 staff members conducted studies in 65 countries. After nearly 2 decades at Duke, he joined the Stanford Department of Medicine in 2012, where he currently heads 330 faculty members in 14 divisions.

According to Dr. Harrington, new clinical research is essential to the development of hospital quality measurement, public reporting, and pay-for-performance programs. In the SCAI announcement, he commented, “There needs to be a commitment on behalf of interventional cardiology to make sure that we get those quality indicators right and the way we do that is through clinical investigation.”

SCAI noted that Dr. Harrington’s lecture will discuss the reasons that the demand for research is especially high right now, as the emphasis continues to build for following practice guidelines and appropriate use criteria and for meeting new quality improvement benchmarks. Dr. Harrington stated that evidence-based guidelines established by professional societies are the foundation for clinical practice, and there is an expectation by the public that physicians are following these guidelines.

Dr. Harrington added, “Clinical research is what makes these guidelines possible. Increasingly, reimbursement is tied to some of these performance and quality performance indicators.”

He will also discuss the challenges of integrating clinical research into practice because of the complexity of the rules and regulations that govern research, which he advised, is further complicated by the challenge of limited funding, particularly from the National Institutes of Health. Partnerships with industry and increased lobbying have become important for generating research dollars, but these efforts are complicated. He said, “The intense examination of relationships between clinical academic researchers and industry partners has threatened the ability to do excellent collaborative work.”

Dr. Harrington hopes to inspire the invasive and interventional cardiologists attending SCAI 2015 to undertake more clinical research and stimulate interest in their younger peers, who will require a considerable amount of training before they are ready to venture out into the research environment on their own.

“We face a difficult road, and we have to pay attention to the next generation of clinical investigators. The need for evidence is not going to diminish, and we need people who can generate it, interpret it, and disseminate it,” stated Dr. Harrington in the SCAI announcement.