This year, we celebrate ten years of the Parkview Mirro Center for Research and Innovation. To mark the milestone, we sat down with Michael Mirro, MD, chief academic research officer, to reflect on how the building, and the programs that function within it, came to be.
From the beginning, Dr. Mirro knew his primary goal. He wanted to invest in the community so that Parkview Health could provide the best possible care. “I went to [former Parkview CEO] Mike Packnett about 15 years ago and said I had this idea that we should have a building, because we had all this work being done in clinical research for our region, but no one understood what we were doing. It was decentralized,” he said. “And so that's when we began the mission of the center, focused on improving patient-centric care by bringing the newest therapies to patients and train young people on the future of being an investigator in the life science industry.”
Clinical research
Dr. Mirro’s work in research began long before the center was constructed. “We launched this program 38 years ago to teach medical students about clinical research. It's called a Student Education Research Fellowship (SERF). With their data collection, we try to bring it ultimately to publication, which will help with their career.”
Simulation
Education is one of Dr. Mirro’s greatest passions, and simulation offers hands-on opportunities. “We need an advanced simulation lab to train and retrain existing clinicians and new clinicians on procedures and complex situations that arise in care. It's been incredibly successful and we're continuing to expand that with a mobile simulation lab to go to rural communities. That's been very effective and means that patients will receive outstanding care in this region.”
Data and value
“The biggest impact that the work at the center has had for healthcare in our region is that it’s raised the level of quality to the highest level that we can by bringing treatments to patients, so they don't have to travel hundreds of miles to get the care they need,” Dr. Mirro said.
This all came to a head during a very critical time. “The value of the center became glaringly obvious during the pandemic. The health services and informatics team all worked on the data science side to figure out what the hospital had to do in real time to launch a vaccination clinic at the conference center. And so, the investment of Parkview to bring this over many years now was realized, and very tangible.”
The future of healthcare innovation
“If you think about healthcare now in 2025, probably the most significant thing that came out of clinical research is the advancement in genomics and Precision medicine. The entire human genome was sequenced earlier than people had thought. And we now are partnering with an entity called Helix to do complete genome-wide sequencing of the population in Northeast Indiana. So that's just going to get upstream in medicine. If we can treat women with breast cancer in the earliest stage, there’s a much better chance of curing it. And now, all of these things will create the opportunity for our region to have the healthiest community possible, and that is the future of the best care.”
