For AMA member Tracey L. Henry, MD, a summer job conducting Alzheimer’s research almost two decades ago has turned into a career-long quest to find ways to prevent or mitigate health inequities.
“I absolutely loved it, and that's when I really learned about the process of research and how to get involved,” said Dr. Henry, a former member of the AMA Council on Legislation, who has been both an AMA Health Systems Science Scholar and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy fellow.
“Much of my work has been serendipitous and being at the right place at the right time, but it's really having a passion around improving the health of the patients and the populations I serve,” said Dr. Henry.
On the opposite end, Luis Seija, MD, said he used to think research “was kind of boring,” and that, as a medical student he “was doing a lot of things for the sake of doing a lot of things” because that’s what he thought was necessary to land a good residency position.
Then, however, Dr. Seija started to notice different patterns in the care patients were receiving and began to ask “Why aren’t we doing this? Why aren’t we doing that?”
It was then he received a grant opportunity and set up a comprehensive screening and treatment program for hepatitis C patients through the medical student-run free clinic.
“That's where things got started for me,” Dr. Seija said, and he’s been implementing interventions and measuring outcomes ever since.
Drs. Seija and Henry spoke during an AMA Research Challenge event last year on how to advance healthy equity through research.
For medical students looking to hone their research skills, the AMA offers resources and programs that bring you from the basics all the way to the AMA Research Challenge where you too can compete for a $10,000 prize presented by Laurel Road. The deadline to submit an abstract for the 2025 AMA Research Challenge is July 16.
Answer questions that inform policy
The delegate for the AMA Minority Affairs Section Governing Council, Dr. Seija is participating in the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine’s National Clinician Scholars Program, which he credits with helping him develop structure for his research.
This includes identifying a question the research is intended to answer and figuring out how to "answer the question through a health-equity lens.”
Dr. Henry also noted that her goal with research now is to “answer questions that inform policy.”
“If you can inform policy, you can have a greater grand effect and help more patients,” she said. “The tip is really taking what you're seeing clinically—which is why it's so awesome if you're a researcher and you still have some clinical time—and asking, what can I do to make this better?”
When answers are desired quickly, the preparation for data collection and getting institutional review board approval can bog research down.
When that’s the case, Dr. Henry recommends using secondary sources of information such as Medicaid and Medicare databases and datasets from where she used to work—the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
“I’ve used those to answer questions, and then those questions turned into papers where they've been used to advance policy,” she said.
What drives research
Dr. Seija noted that a physician’s research focus can be something that they never imagined when they first started doing the work. For him, “one of the biggest things is realizing that you don't choose the issues—that issues really choose you.”
“This has always been my case,” he said, adding that he didn’t intend to focus on hepatitis C, but then he became “invested” in it.
When medical students interview for residency, it can be obvious if the research they did was just something done to pad their CV.
“I remember as I interviewed applicants for residency, now it's very clear when you're not invested in the work,” he said. “Doing things for the sake of doing things—it's hard to really have meaningful work out of that.”
That having been said, when the research is intended to advance health equity, sometimes it can be hard for research novices to identify concrete, measurable outcomes.
That is where mentors are invaluable because they can help identify optimal primary and secondary endpoints.
Dr. Seija urged medical students and residents who are doing equity-driven research to keep the ultimate goal in mind, which is to make a difference.
“Advancing health equity doesn't mean that you have to have research that's published in New England Journal Medicine or The Lancet or anything like that,” Dr. Seija said. “Sometimes advancing health equity is just doing the right thing.”
The AMA Center for Health Equity works to embed health equity across the AMA organization so that health equity becomes part of the practice, process, action, innovation and organizational performance and outcomes. Explore the AMA’s 2024–2025 strategic plan to advance health equity.
