SUMMARY
Casey M. Clements, M.D., Ph.D., is an emergency physician-scientist who leads research in two distinct areas of clinical and healthcare delivery science.
One research program focuses on workplace violence in healthcare, including strategies to prevent, mitigate and respond to threats and assaults by patients and visitors. The other focuses on sepsis and serious infections encountered in emergency care, including diagnostic and prognostic testing, evidence-based management, and clinical trials.
Although both programs are informed by Dr. Clements' experience in emergency medicine, they address different challenges and represent independent areas of scholarship. His workplace violence research aims to improve safety for healthcare professionals. His infection research seeks to enhance the recognition and treatment of patients with potentially life-threatening infections.
Focus areas
Healthcare workplace violence prevention, mitigation and response
Dr. Clements studies violence against healthcare professionals as an occupational safety, workforce and patient care issue. His research examines the frequency, forms and consequences of threats and assaults affecting the multidisciplinary care team, including physicians, nurses, security officers, emergency medical services personnel, registration staff, technicians, phlebotomists, care team assistants and others whose work places them at risk.
His studies have documented the prevalence and underreporting of workplace violence, as well as its effects on patient interactions and the psychological well-being and career decisions of staff. By examining violence across emergency departments, hospitals and prehospital settings, his team identifies both shared and setting-specific risks and explores how incidents that begin in the community may continue during transport and after arrival at a healthcare facility.
Dr. Clements also develops and evaluates practical approaches for preventing, mitigating and responding to workplace violence. This work includes structured safety huddles for patients at risk of aggressive or violent behavior, prehospital violence alerts, verbal de-escalation techniques, multidisciplinary care planning, incident reporting, postevent learning, and support for affected staff.
His weapons-related research has explored passive weapons detection and deterrence in emergency departments, assaults involving conventional and improvised weapons, violence that extends from out-of-hospital settings into healthcare facilities, and patterns of hospital-based shootings in the United States.
Through this work, Dr. Clements seeks to develop evidence-informed, humane and sustainable safety systems that protect healthcare personnel while preserving compassionate and appropriate access to care.
Workplace violence research focus areas:
- Measuring workplace violence and its effects on the workforce. Dr. Clements studies who experiences workplace violence, the types of incidents that occur, reasons events may go unreported, and the effects of violence on psychological well-being, workforce retention, perceptions of patients and the ability of healthcare teams to provide compassionate care.
- Developing and evaluating prevention strategies. His research evaluates interventions designed to reduce the risk of workplace violence, including structured safety huddles, shared situational awareness processes, de-escalation techniques, prehospital dispatch alerts, and multidisciplinary care plans for patients with known behavioral or violence-related risks.
- Addressing weapons and high-consequence events. Dr. Clements studies the use of firearms, knives, contraband and improvised weapons in healthcare environments. This work includes evaluating weapons detection and deterrence systems, identifying patterns in hospital-based shootings, and improving organizational preparedness, response and learning following serious incidents.
Sepsis and emergency infection
In a separate research program, Dr. Clements studies the diagnosis, prognosis and management of sepsis and other serious infections during the first hours of emergency care. During this critical period, patients may deteriorate rapidly, diagnostic information is often incomplete or evolving, and clinicians must make time-sensitive treatment decisions in the face of uncertainty.
His research evaluates both established and emerging diagnostic approaches, including conventional biomarkers, molecular and culture-independent pathogen detection, host-response testing, and artificial intelligence-based blood tests. Rather than treating a test result as an isolated positive or negative signal, Dr. Clements examines how diagnostic findings should be interpreted in relation to illness severity, timing, clinical trajectory and the likelihood that a patient will benefit from a specific treatment. His work includes prospective biomarker studies, development of an emergency department sepsis biobank and participation in the clinical validation of blood tests designed to support the diagnosis and prognosis of acute infection and sepsis.
Dr. Clements also studies evidence-based treatment and the implementation of reliable sepsis care. His research has included the development and evaluation of real-time electronic health record surveillance, automated alerts, clinical decision support tools, and diagnostic-to-treatment workflows in emergency and critical care settings. He has participated in multicenter infection research, including serving as site principal investigator for the VICTAS randomized clinical trial of vitamin C, thiamine and hydrocortisone and for the Hospital Air Quality (HAIQU) study within the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) BREATHE program. His work also has included studies of long-term cognitive, psychological and functional outcomes among sepsis survivors.
Through this research, Dr. Clements seeks to identify which diagnostic information should guide treatment decisions, which patients are most likely to benefit from specific interventions, and how promising tests and therapies can be effectively integrated into real-world emergency care.
Sepsis and infection research focus areas:
- Diagnostic and prognostic testing. Dr. Clements studies how established biomarkers and emerging molecular, pathogen detection and host-response technologies can improve the recognition of infection, identify patients at risk of clinical deterioration and provide prognostic information that supports treatment decisions.
- Treatment selection and clinical trials. His research examines evidence-based approaches to sepsis management and evaluates novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies through prospective, pragmatic and multicenter clinical studies. A central goal is to identify the right treatment for the right patient at the right stage of illness.
- Implementation and patient-centered outcomes. Dr. Clements evaluates how sepsis screening, electronic health record surveillance and clinical decision support systems influence patient care. He also studies whether early diagnostic and treatment decisions improve not only short-term physiological outcomes, but also survival, cognitive function, psychological well-being and long-term functional recovery.
Significance to patient care
Dr. Clements' workplace violence research focuses on making healthcare safer for both staff and patients. He studies why violence occurs in healthcare settings, how it affects healthcare workers and which strategies can help prevent it. His goal is to help create safer care environments where healthcare professionals can focus on providing compassionate, high-quality care.
His sepsis and infection research addresses a different but equally important challenge: helping clinicians recognize serious infections early and provide the right treatment at the right time. He studies new tests and care approaches that can improve recovery and overall patient outcomes.