Integrating Medical Research with Practice

The Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute was founded on the idea that research and clinical practice each work best when they can collaborate and inform each other. Today, the value of this model is being increasingly recognized as healthcare research puts greater emphasis on measuring how scientific breakthroughs affect real world patient outcomes.

PAMFRI is unique in that for more than 60 years, it has drawn on the experience and data of one of the nation’s oldest and most well-established multispecialty medical groups to inform its research and test its findings. With an onsite location at the PAMF Palo Alto Center, the research institute allows doctors to work directly with leading researchers to test ideas for improving patient care, while allowing the researchers to explore clinical data for patterns that may suggest ways to improve healthcare practice. Geography is not a constraint; PAMFRI researchers work in PAMF’s clinics from Santa Cruz to Mountain View and Fremont to Burlingame.

In this quest to improve patient care and healthcare practice, PAMFRI investigators are aided by the Foundation’s deep investment in electronic health records for its patients. PAMF was one of the first outpatient healthcare providers in the nation to use electronic health records and today has one of the largest and longest-running electronic health record data sets available. Carefully scrubbed of personally identifiable health information, the data is helping to answer some of medicine’s most pressing questions about what works best in treating disease, managing chronic conditions and keeping patients healthy.