2025 REDAC CTSI Awardees
2025 AWARDEES & PROJECT DETAILS
The second annual REDAC-CTSI opportunity was announced in April 2025 for support in developing a data-driven research or evaluation project for employees at Hennepin Healthcare by the REDAC team. Criteria for submission were for the potential to improve patient care, impact health equity, and be completed using the EPIC COSMOS database within a 6-month time frame.
REDAC supported awardees with methodological consultation, project management, data analytics, statistical support, and dissemination of findings.
UNDERSTANDING AND ADDRESSING COLON CANCER TREATMENT DELAYS AT HENNEPIN HEALTHCARE COMPARED TO NATIONAL DATA USING EPIC COSMOS
Researched by Margaret Crosby, MD, Internal Medicine Resident, Hennepin Healthcare
Mentorship Team
- Mark Linzer, MD, Department of Medicine, Hennepin Healthcare
- Alexandra Rezazedeh, MD, Department of Hematology-Oncology, Hennepin Healthcare
Reason for Research
Safety-net hospitals like Hennepin Healthcare serve a diverse population of patients who often face complex social and structural barriers that can impact their ability to receive timely colon cancer care. Understanding the presence and etiology of these delays, both from the time of screening to diagnosis and from diagnosis to surgical intervention, is critical to improving our ability to ensure equitable care.
Using Cosmos
Access to a large-scale database like COSMOS would allow for a better understanding and building of conceptual models of patients' experiences with colon cancer care across many healthcare systems nationally. Through the process of quantifying and examining delays at Hennepin Healthcare and by learning from national benchmarks, we can identify modifiable patient-level and system-level factors. This knowledge can then create actionable goals to improve the timeliness of colon cancer care at Hennepin Healthcare.
HEALTH BEFORE HARM: CHRONIC CONDITIONS AND CARE PATTERNS PRIOR TO FIREARM INJURY
Researched by Charly Vang, MPH, Department of Surgery, Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute
Mentorship Team
- Rachel Nygaard, PhD, Department of Surgery, Hennepin Healthcare
- Derek Lumbard, MD, Department of Surgery, Hennepin Healthcare
Reason for Research
While firearm injury prevention efforts often focus on the social drivers of health or criminal justice interventions, less is known about how hospital touchpoints or healthcare utilization patterns can inform primary prevention or the burden of conditions that may have developed after the injury. By identifying chronic disease burden and patterns of care, we aim to uncover factors contributing to increased risk and missed opportunities for earlier interventions.
Using Cosmos
Cosmos enables us to explore variations in healthcare access and utilization across geographic areas and populations, offering a more comprehensive understanding of how care patterns may signal elevated risk prior to injury. This is especially valuable in trauma care, where the severity of injuries often necessitates treatment at facilities outside a patient's usual or preferred healthcare network. Ultimately, Cosmos allows us to construct a more holistic clinical profile of patients prior to firearm injury that captures medical complexity and potential care gaps that will help inform upstream strategies that go beyond the trauma setting and support primary prevention efforts across health systems.