EM Resident Conference by Modupe Osikomaiya (1.26.21)

Last week, myself and four other EMRA members had the privilege of attending an UCLA RRMC Emergency Medicine Resident Conference. As a new member, this was one of the first events I attended outside of our general meetings, so I was looking forward to experiencing some of the benefits that come with being a part of the EMRA family. Despite being on Zoom, the event surpassed my expectations by creating a welcoming atmosphere that made material easy to digest and gave me the extra motivation I need as I pursue my personal research endeavors. Being in an atmosphere with residents, attendings, and students like myself made it evident that there is a unified community within the sciences that can come together for the purpose of bettering healthcare. I was captivated by the array of presentations, which included topics such as informatics and innovation, lab basics, and even a short presentation on elbows. One presentation in particular caught my eye: Dr. Akie, an EM resident, explaining propensity scores. The presentation focused on propensity scores, the probability of treatment assignment conditional on observed baseline characteristics. Dr. Akie went into great detail about the importance of representative sampling and how propensity scores can be used to make inferences about treatments when randomized trials are either impossible or not conducted and the only data available is from observational studies. I am currently enrolled in a statistics course at UCLA, so it was amazing to see some of the concepts discussed in lecture, such as significance values, standard deviation, and data collection bias, being discussed in a clinical research setting. The first two years of my UCLA experience has been centered around learning the foundations of science, and the conference helped me realize that I have the information and skill set needed to be a part of larger conversations that prioritize problem solving and collaboration to reach a common goal. Overall, attending the EM Conference for the first time was an eye-opening experience, and I look forward to attending more conferences in the future.