Do you have 5 minutes to help our specialty? If so, let me personally invite you to become a member of the Emergency Medicine Practice Research Network (EM-PRN). Becoming a member is simple; just go to www.acep.org/emprn, click on the link, and answer a brief survey. It will take less than 5 minutes. And it will provide ACEP with essential information for our advocacy in Washington and improving emergency care. To stay a member, all you need is to agree that you will complete three or four surveys a year, which should take 5 minutes or less each.

Membership at this time is open only to ACEP members, residents, attendings, and life members.

Many other specialties have built practice research networks. Pediatrics has had one for more than a decade. They started small, like us. They have found that getting data from physicians practicing in diverse communities is often very different from getting it from inner-city teaching hospitals.

Once you join EM-PRN, you will be able to do much more than just give opinions in response to survey questions. We want to submit ideas for research projects and survey questions that YOU would be interested in. Our group will pick the more interesting and the most popular for the next survey. So you not only will be providing answers, you’ll be designing the questions. Right now and for the next few years, EM-PRN will be largely surveys. Eventually, we will likely want to grow to collect some data. For example, we might in the future want to monitor the number of patients seen with chronic pain in emergency departments. You would simply count the actual number of patients you see during a single shift (no names, no identifiers) and submit it to ACEP.

We could then monitor this number over time to see if it is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same. The members of EM-PRN will help direct what research projects we consider and will be acknowledged on any publication. Members will also receive the results of any project ahead of publication.

ACEP plans to implement EM-PRN in three phases. Phase 1 is happening now and involves the recruitment of enough volunteers to create a viable and active network, and the goal is to have this network in place by June 30, 2012. Your participation ultimately could yield a host of benefits to the profession. For example, the answers given by practicing emergency physicians will help improve the practice for everybody. Research findings would be immediately relevant to the clinician and, in theory, could be assimilated into everyday practice. This research could also help identify any potential problems that arise in daily practice that contribute to the gap between recommended care and actual care.

Targeted surveys and further development of the network’s infrastructure will follow so that longitudinal multicenter involvement can be initiated.

Volunteers like you will determine how quickly the project develops, and the first step is an easy 5-minute survey with just 15 questions. Here are three to give you an idea of the direction:

• Estimate the percentage of patients you see for chronic pain (an acute exacerbation or medication need).
• In the past month, have you seen any patients who have ingested the designer drug popularly called bath salts? If yes, approximate number?
• Which imaging study do you routinely use first to evaluate pediatric patients with possible appendicitis?
• In 5 minutes, you could help take an important step in advocating for our patients and our practice.
• Improved clinical experience and patient outcomes is the ultimate goal, so become a member today, and help us launch this exciting new project.

Dr. Schneider is ACEP’s Immediate Past President and a professor and chair emeritus of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Rochester and attending physician at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y.