Ronald Harris, MMCi, was accepted to the Duke University School of Medicine in 2020, just as COVID-19 was spreading through the world and changing health care.
Harris already had ideas about how to make patient care better himself, thanks to his experiences shadowing and volunteering in hospitals, as well as the perspective he gained from completing Duke’s 12-month Master of Management in Clinical Informatics (MMCi) program.
Harris learned about MMCi through his mom, who is a nurse at Duke Health. The program helped him see health care through a wider lens. “The MMCI program gave me a very broad understanding of health care, how all the different components interact, but also the ability to think critically about individual components of that system,” he said.
Now, as a fourth-year medical student at Duke, he has co- authored several scholarly research publications and has been involved in research that has changed heath care at Duke.
Harris was co-first author, with his mentor, Vijay Krishnamoorthy, MD, associate professor of anesthesiology, of a 2024 review article in the journal Anesthesiology that drew on their experiences creating Duke’s learning health system. The learning health care system model is driven by the idea that data generated from an electronic health record can be used to better inform clinical knowledge and decisions in real or near-real time.
Duke’s learning health care system went live in 2021-2022, and Harris joined the team as they were beginning to explore ICU data, building tables, and presenting findings at critical care grand rounds. He contributed to the research and resulting improvements in patient care, including a change in care for patients undergoing liver transplants. The data showed that use of cyanokit (a vitamin B supplement) during liver transplants was associated with increased risk of severe acute kidney injury, need for dialysis, and longer hospital stays.
As a result, Duke Health stopped using this supplement in these patients. A publication describing this improvement is currently under peer review, Harris said.
In 2023 he won the Vice Dean’s Science Award for Best Clinical Research for a study examining associations between social determinants of health and COVID-19 mortality in Duke Health intensive care units (ICUs). The results from this study, which were published in 2024 in the American Journal of Critical Care, found that clinical factors were most predictive of mortality for these patients, rather than social determinants of health (as measured by the area deprivation index, which is a composite measure of social determinants of health).
“It has been very rewarding to have many of the projects I’ve been involved in serve as foundations for subsequent interventions and research,” Harris said.
He plans to pursue a career in anesthesiology and critical care medicine, focusing on changing health care practices nationwide through integration of new informatics, AI, and technological systems to create more equitable and accessible care.