The inaugural Lee Health Research Day on March 11 was like “a science fair for doctors.”

That’s how Dr. Elvin Mendez, one of the organizers of the day-long forum, described it after the event. More than 130 researchers presented 38 studies, which Lee Health said, “showcased the organization’s dedication to driving innovation and advancing medical treatment in Southwest Florida.”

Mendez, who serves as medical director of academics, clinical research and precision medicine across the Lee Health system, said the event, he hopes will become an annual one, offered physicians and other health care practitioners across disciplines the opportunity to share information about innovative developments in their respective fields.

“It’s an opportunity for us to gather together and share the work that we’re all doing,” Mendez said. “Everyone is busy, and we don’t often see the work that we do at individual locations; different sites at any given time are performing some form of research.

“The beauty of having a research day is we’re able to bring in various specialties and fields that may not see each other on a routine basis. We had physical therapy and pharmacy; medical students in family medicine and internal medicine; gastroenterology and, of course, cardiology.”

Part of the goal, Mendez said, is to keep the community informed about the types of research going on throughout one of Florida’s largest health care systems.

“Historically, many people equate research to a lab, and they think of rodents and so forth, and that’s not what we do,” Mendez said. “We don’t do any ‘bench’ [lab] work here. Everything we do here is more community-based research. For example, we do what we call retrospective studies, where we look back at our medical records and look at a particular disease, or we may look at prospective studies where we’re looking forward on our patients and diseases they may have.”

Innovations in AI-powered research

Mendez cited an ongoing heart-health study being run by Lee Health’s cardiovascular center using artificial intelligence as representative of how the system is using cutting-edge technology.

Dr. Elvin Mendez

“It’s a two- to three-year program looking at how they can leverage AI and cardiac computed tomography angiography,” he said. “They will use a three-dimensional image of the heart, and software that uses AI that can actually predict outcomes based on the findings. We’re hoping that once they have data within the next two to three years that will be publishable, but it also allows us to not only see where we are at the time the study starts, but also as we go on and if it needs to be treated, we will then see the outcome of that.”

He said one of the advantages of AI is the ability to “derive meaningful information from volumes of data,” especially when the Lee Health system sees almost 2 million patient visits a year.

“If you look at that and you think about that volume, there’s a lot of data,” Mendez said. “How can an individual or group of individuals be able to navigate that and deep dive into that data in a timely fashion? That’s where innovation comes into play, where you have this overlap of technology and health care working together to improve the health care of our communities. With AI, we are able to actually deep dive into that data and pull out meaningful information that correlates one thing with another; the speed of information that we obtain is probably the most important.”

Focus on clinical trials

Looking ahead to future research day events, Mendez said he hopes to spotlight some of the clinical trials that are ongoing at Lee Health.

“Clinical trials are studies that are usually sponsored by either a pharmaceutical company or an instrument company for our cardiothoracic [staff],” he said. “Those are constant and ongoing, and you’ll see that in the oncology side, both pediatric and adult. And at our Shipley Cardiothoracic Center you’ll see a lot of what we call pivotal studies, testing, for example, different devices for implantation.

“This is ongoing on a constant basis and has been for the last almost 30 years. We’re just now highlighting to the public what we’re doing, as we have grown more and more cohesive within the Lee Health research arena. We’ll see a lot more next year, and we’re very excited about what’s to come in the next 12 months.”