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The Arnold P. Gold Foundation Research Institute recently created the Richard Frankel Award for Creating a Loving Community – in recognition of the contributions and achievements of HSR&D investigator Richard M. Frankel, PhD, part of HSR&D’s Center for Health Information and Communication (CHIC) located in Indianapolis, IN. The Gold Research Institute was created in 2012 to help accelerate discovery in humanism in healthcare, disseminate findings, and use those findings to make change.
Also a professor of medicine at Indiana University and an investigator with the Regenstrief Institute, Dr. Frankel has devoted his career to nurturing the social and emotion contexts of the doctor-patient relationship – and the researchers who study it – to improve medical care and outcomes. Dr. Frankel leads the VA inter-professional fellowship program in patient safety and is involved in several safety-related VA research projects. For example, he conducted an HSR&D-funded study “Culture and Context Affect High Reliability in Transfers in Care,” which highlights the importance of end-of-shift handoffs in improving the quality and safety of patient care. He also is leading a newly funded HSR&D study titled “Improving Patient Care and Physician Resilience through Effective Veteran-Centered Communication and Documentation Practices.” In addition, Dr. Frankel has been a senior mentor for more than 25 research fellows and more than 10 junior faculty in medicine, pediatrics, and family medicine.
The first recipient of the Richard Frankel Award for Creating a Loving Community is Helen Reiss, MD, director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The award was presented to Dr. Reiss during the Gold Foundation's Mapping the Landscape Symposium in Chicago in May 2018.
