Goals

Dr Matt Leavitt, the founder and medical director of Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery (ADCS) , has undertaken the challenge of establishing the largest networked clinical research group in the country. At this point, ADCS sees over 400,000 patients per year. Dr Leavitt recognizes that never before has there been an opportunity to provide this many patients access to clinical trials. Nor has there ever been the ability to provide to those doing clinical studies potential access to tens of thousands of patients.

Dr Leavitt has assigned James A Solomon, MD PhD, the Director of Ameriderm Research, the Research Division of ADCS, the task to achieve this goal. The plan is to recruit the entire group of over 70 providers in ADCS either to directly participate in research studies or to identify and refer patients to these studies. Several key sites throughout Florida will be established as primary research sites. Initial primary sites will include Ormond Beach, one in the Orlando area, one in South Florida. Others will follow as needed. The remaining offices will become satellite sites which help recruit study patients. The entire 400,000 patients will come under electronic medical records.

In addition to his role as Director of the Ameriderm Research, Dr Solomon holds academic appointments as Assistant Clinical Professor at University of Illinois Medical School, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as well as Associate Professor at University Central Florida College of Medicine (UCF) Through Dr Solomon’s access to mini and super computers at the UIUC, multi-factorial clinical patient data can be analyzed for tens of thousands of patients. This can greatly expand the size of NIH studies that can be done through universities. In addition, the access to such multi-factorial data will allow industry to determine what other factors may be contributing to the success or failure of their product. In addition, the Research Division is developing cooperation on basic clinical research projects at both UIUC and UCF.

Despite that we are primarily a dermatology practice; we plan to include studies across all fields of medicine. We have several family practice physicians who work within our group with clinical research experience. In addition, the EMR will open access to non-dermatology medical information. We also intend to cooperate with physicians in other fields of medicine to fully expand the clinical studies into other areas medicine.

We look forward to working with industry and universities to achieve this medical research goal.