8 July 2021
Principal Investigators Honored at Madigan Research Day 2021
LTC Christopher Colombo, MD won the BG George J. Brown Mentor’s Cube Award and COL (Ret) Edward Arrington, MD won Best Clinical Session as well as the COL Paul J. Amoroso Staff Award
Madigan Army Medical Center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM), recently held its annual Madigan Research Day (MRD) where two Geneva principal investigators were honored for their research contributions. A well-established acknowledgment of military medical research and its benefits at one of the Department of Defense’s largest medical training facilities, MRD was held 7 May 2021 and was hosted by Madigan’s Department of Clinical Investigation.
The BG George J. Brown Mentor’s Cube Award is given to honor the vital role that a mentor provides in the process of medical education and research. The 2021 award was received by Principal Investigator Lt. Col. Christopher Colombo, MD, FACP who is the director of Virtual Health and Telecritical Care at Madigan. He is also the Medical Director for the Telemedical Research for Operational Support (TR4OS) program at JBLM. He currently oversees three large, multi-site awards with Geneva, with a fourth Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP) grant on the way.
LTC (Dr.) Colombo is one of the initial nine clinical/technical team awardees who is leading the rapid development, deployment, and testing of the National Emergency TeleCritical Care Network (NETCCN), a project managed by Geneva. NETCCN is a cloud-based, low-resource, stand-alone health information management system for the creation and coordination of flexible and extendable “virtual critical care wards.” NETCCN will support the extension of high-quality intensive care to places that lack adequate critical care expertise and resources.
MRD provides a positive impact on the growth of scholarly activity and offers mentorship and peer review for investigators. Preclinical, clinical, and quality improvement podium presentations were presented at the event along with awards, which returned to a modified, in-person platform, after COVID-19 required the event last year to be held entirely virtual.
One of those podium awards was received by Principal Investigator COL (Ret) Edward Arrington, MD, who won best clinical session and the COL Paul J. Amoroso Staff Award for best staff member presentation for his podium presentation entitled, “Prospective, Randomized Clinical Evaluation of Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) Reconstruction Grafts.” Dr. Arrington is an orthopedic surgeon specializing at Madigan in sports medicine. He is also the Orthopedic Surgery Residency Program Director at Madigan.
Geneva managed a research grant for Dr. Arrington on his work that found that the use of allograft tendons, or donor tissue, can be safe and effective for ACL reconstruction, according to data Dr. Arrington presented at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Annual Meeting in 2016.
Geneva is proud to have supported important research and innovative researchers at Madigan since Geneva was founded in 1993. Madigan is the Army’s second-largest medical treatment facility one of only two designated Level II trauma centers in Army Medicine.
