Emergency Medicine Research at UH Growing in Impact
February 23, 2025
UH Clinical Update | February 2025
The Emergency Medicine team at University Hospitals treats people every day for heart attacks, strokes and every other manner of medical emergency. However, a growing part of what they do is asking questions about this very care and investigating new ways to make improvements.
Kiran Faryar, MD, MPHResearch funding to the department to explore new options, for example -- from federal, state, local, foundation and industry sources -- is way up. In 2022, the team secured grants worth $264,000, with this number ballooning to more than $3.5 million currently. This includes 15 active grants as of 2024 – a 67% increase over the previous year.
Emergency Medicine physician and clinical researcher Kiran Faryar, MD, MPH, joined UH in 2021 as Director of Research and has led the team in this impressive growth.
“Back then, it was just me, but there was a lot of opportunity there,” she says. “Our faculty were involved in and initiated a lot of very interesting and innovative programs. They just needed some guidance on how to turn that into research.”
Within Emergency Medicine at UH, game-changing research is currently underway in several broad areas, including ED operations, pre-hospital care, critical care (including a relatively rare ECMO/ECPR program), population health, toxicology and ultrasound.
One important example: Developing and implementing universal HIV and HCV screening and linkage to care. Dr. Faryar leads the department’s ED HIV/HCV linkage to care program, which is in place at every ED in the UH system. The program has attracted $1.3 million in funding from both industry and government, including Gilead Sciences and the Health Resources & Services Administration’s (HRSA) Ryan White Ending the HIV Epidemic program. “This program has reached people throughout Northeast Ohio, linking hundreds of high-risk, vulnerable patients with HIV or HCV to outpatient treatment,” Dr. Faryar says.
Another project, recently funded by a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through its Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), is testing offering alternatives to opioids in the ED. The research team includes Dr. Faryar, Christine Davis, MBA, Project Manager, Center for Emergency Medicine; toxicologist and Emergency Medicine physician Ryan Marino, MD, and Sam Rodgers-Melnick, MPH, LPMT, MT-BC, a researcher with UH Connor Whole Health. The project, led by Dr. Faryar, aims to decrease opioid use in the ED by educating providers on integrative therapies such as music therapy and acupuncture, implementing these modalities within the emergency department, and providing sustained outpatient follow-up through University Hospitals Connor Whole Health. The research builds evidence for how to best promote and integrate these integrative medicine modalities in emergency medicine to more effectively treat patients and improve their long-term outcomes.
University Hospitals is conducting the ED-ALTO study of alternatives to opioids in the ED. Pictured here in the UH Cleveland Medical Center ED is UH music therapist John Pearson.“Alternatives to opioids (ALTO) are evidence-based practices that have been used in inpatient and outpatient clinical settings, but the novel aspect of this project is bringing these evidence-based interventions into the emergency department,” Dr. Faryar says. “While there have been a few trials that have looked at ALTO in the ED, this practice is not widespread. We are looking at patients’ response to alternative therapies, specifically pain and anxiety. We are also examining the effects of such interventions on opioid usage.”
The Emergency Medicine team at UH is also now part of the NIH-funded Strategies to Innovate Emergency Care Clinical Trials Network (SIREN), specifically as a clinical site in its ICECAP (Influence of Cooling Duration on Efficacy in Cardiac Arrest Patients) trial. The study will enroll comatose adult survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest who have been rapidly cooled using a definitive temperature control method to determine if an optimal duration of cooling can improve clinical outcomes.
“Our department was invited to participate in the ICECAP trial through the SIREN network, which was an exciting academic and clinical research achievement for us,” Dr. Faryar adds. “SIREN will provide our department an opportunity and pipeline for other clinical trials down the road.”
The department has several other research projects in the works, and Dr. Faryar says they all center around one main imperative: “How can we improve the care of patients in the emergency department to help their short-term and long-term health outcomes?” she says.