Centralized infrastructure facilitates medical education research

The Council of Academic Family Medicine Educational Research Alliance has enabled a large number of research teams to conduct meaningful scholarship with a fraction of the usual time and energy.

CERA regularly conducts omnibus surveys of key family medicine education leaders, a process that includes collaboration with experienced mentors, centralized institutional review board clearance, pilot testing, and centralized data collection.

As of October 2017, CERA completed 30 omnibus surveys resulting in more than 75 scientific presentations and more than 55 peer reviewed publications.

By creating an infrastructure capable of overcoming some of the key barriers to conducting research, CERA has increased family medicine's research productivity and increased the number of family medicine faculty participating in research, including scholars with less experience and/or fewer resources.

The authors state that the CERA model could be replicated in other specialties to facilitate collaborative research.