Engineer Award
Sponsored by the Evidence-Based Healthcare & Implementation Interest Group
The Engineer Award honors an abstract that evaluates the implementation, or de-implementation, of a process that leads to an evidence-based improvement in patient care. Both implementation and clinical outcomes should be reported, with the focus being on the implementation.
All abstracts that have been accepted for inclusion at the 2025 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia will be screened for eligibility for the award. If you believe that your accepted submission is eligible, you may ensure that it is considered by emailing Sangil Lee, MD.
Quality improvement projects may be considered if they describe the implementation methods and address the effectiveness of the implementation protocol as well as the corresponding clinical outcomes. The abstracts will be scored in two phases using a modified RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation Consistency, Maintenance) approach, one of the classic evaluation tools for knowledge translation first described by Glasgow, et al, in 1999.
First, judges will score written abstracts on the reach, effectiveness, adoption, and maintenance. For the top three abstracts, the oral or poster presentation will be then judged live at the SAEM Annual Meeting focusing again on the reach, adoption, and the evidence base behind the process change. From these scores, a final winner will be chosen and announced at the conclusion of the SAEM Annual Meeting.
About Dr. Engineer
Rakesh Engineer was a devoted husband to his wife Nivi (née Sharan) and a dedicated father to three sons. As an emergency medicine clinical researcher, Rakesh thrived at the interface between published evidence and pragmatic application at the bedside. At the time of his death, he was finalizing an implementation science presentation on rapid cardiac evaluation in the ED for SAEM19 the following week. Rakesh was born in Cleveland, Ohio and attended Ohio State, where he earned both his BS (1992) and MD (1996). After his internship at Barnes-Jewish Hospitals/Washington University in St. Louis, MO, he trained in Emergency Medicine at Spectrum Health (Butterworth Hospital)/Michigan State University in Grand Rapids. Thereafter, he joined the Cleveland Clinic to be with his family, educate the next generation of emergency physicians, and launch his clinical research career. Rakesh epitomized the vision of implementation science that “knowing is not enough...we must apply” and therefore this award will forever bear his name.
What is Implementation Science?
The journal Implementation Science defines this as “the scientific study of methods to promote the uptake of research findings into routine healthcare in clinical, organizational, and policy contexts.” In other words, implementation science programs use the available evidence to achieve measurable improvements in the quality of clinical care. These improvements can occur via implementation, such as adding or improving a process which will improve care, or by de-implementation, which is removing a prior process that has since been shown to be ineffective or harmful so as to better align with the optimal care.