40 years of training physician-scientists: a journey from clinical pearls to evidence-based practice and policies.

Abstract

During the past 4 decades, the training of physician-scientists has been driven by the information needs of clinicians; policymakers; and, more recently, patients who have voiced a strong desire to move from case-based, opinion-driven clinical care to practice informed by evidence. Thought leaders, primarily from the fields of internal medicine, epidemiology, and public health, proposed that this task could best be accomplished by developing researchers grounded in clinical medicine but armed with the skills needed to ask and answer the most pressing clinical and health care delivery questions in medicine. One long-lasting result was the Clinical Scholars Program (CSP), initially funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Commonwealth Foundation and later by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) (1).