Students Spend Summer Doing Medical Research

Now here's a unique "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" story.

Three students spent theirs at the Cleveland Clinic doing research and writing reports that had them working alongside caregivers, physician-researchers and medical students. About 170 students from around the area got to participate.

Junior Deepak Kumar was in a radiology internship. His project was to research and create a single multidisciplinary database for patients with primary liver tumors from the three district liver tumor databases: Interventional Radiology, Liver Transplant and Hepatology/Mayo Clinic Database. The goal of the database is to compare outcomes among different treatments for primary liver tumor patients.

Junior Katelyn Routhier was in the nursing internship. She studied the impact of the addition of a vaccine patrol team to Fairview Hospital’s adult inpatients during a particular week on the number of pneumococcal vaccines administered. Her research showed that not all nurses were able to navigate the internal system to determine whether a patient needed the vaccination, and that vaccines done elsewhere are often not documented because nurses are unable to spend the time to get the patient’s vaccination history.

Senior Wan Kwok participated in the science internship program at the Cleveland Clinic Spine Research Laboratory at Lutheran Hospital. She researched the effects of decompressive surgical procedures on the upper thoracic spine --T4-T5 -- to determine if stabilization using surgical hardware is necessary following decompressive procedures.

Their program was part of the Cleveland Clinic Office of Civic Education Initiatives Summer Internship Program.