Dr. Trautner Receives 2019 Robertson Presidential Award

May 15, 2019

Barbara W. Trautner, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Medicine, Section of Health Services Research, and director of Clinical Research in the Department of Surgery, is a 2019 recipient of the Barbara and Corbin J. Robertson Presidential Award for Excellence in Education. This prestigious award recognizes her meritorious academic accomplishments, her commitment to the mission and vision of Baylor College of Medicine, as well as her stellar and enduring educational contributions. This is the highest educational award made by the college and will be presented at the Medical Education Awards Ceremony on Thursday, May 16, 2019.

Dr. Trautner has contributed meaningfully and consistently to the Baylor educational mission through bedside clinical teaching, educational leadership, a major commitment to mentoring, delivering national webinars, and by creating enduring educational materials. The training programs that she has established, directed, or expanded include the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program, the Houston VA Chief Resident in Quality and Safety Program, and Department of Surgery NHLBI T32 training program. She also co-founded the Houston VA academic hospitalist team while serving as VA site director for the internal medicine residency program.

More recently, Dr. Trautner launched the SHARE program (Surgical Health services Academy for Research and Education), a collaborative effort between IQuESt (the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety), and the Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. The SHARE program’s goal is to develop a cadre of independently-funded surgical-investigators in the field of health services research.

Dr. Trautner has educational impact on a national scale through her research on antibiotic stewardship and urinary tract infections. With funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), she designed educational materials for front-line personnel at over 500 nursing homes in the United States, creating and delivering content to nurses, pharmacists, infection preventionists, and clinical nurse assistants. Many of these educational materials are available to the general public through the web-based AHRQ CAUTI Toolkit. Through AHRQ, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and other organizations, she has delivered 26 infection prevention webinars to national audiences.

In addition to serving as an educator on national research projects, Dr. Trautner’s own research program has a strong component of educational research. Her research team explores knowledge gaps and cognitive biases among healthcare providers and then designs interventions to bring actual clinical practice in line with evidence-based guidelines.

As Director of Clinical Research in the Department of Surgery, Dr. Trautner mentors research projects and grant applications for medical students, residents, fellows, and faculty. She is currently mentoring the five junior faculty members from four different departments at Baylor along their paths to becoming independently-funded clinician-investigators.