You can do plenty of research as an MD.
Yes, but there's a reason you exist, right? There are very few strict MD PI's nowadays and none among the young, without PhD support as a CoI or Co-PI, the Investigator part of any grant application is getting a 5 or higher if they are young nowadays for lack of qualified personnel!
To the OP, you will need to communicate your research expertise better than this as the way that I read your background is more a technical than a scientific one. There are a couple of warning signs based on what you wrote, and I am going to reveal them to you because they are known pitfalls in graduate applications:
1. NEVER speak or write a research statement that is not outcome related especially if it is personal related (the term is researcher narcissism) - When discussing a research background to a professional and not lay audience, it should be guided by the direct work rather than the tools (always discuss the problem before tools).
Contrast:
A. Last year, I used a combination of C++, Assembly, and XML to develop a common data model for inpatient medication dispensing and administration. I used the Assembly to write the medication administration record ties to the medication dispensing equipment, XML to pass messages from the providers to pharmacy and from pharmacy to the frontline, and C++ as the framework for this solution to execute. I supervised a team of twenty staff to implement these protocols and presented on those trials at two national conferences.
B. There are three perspectives on inpatient medications that do not necessarily reconcile: the provider (usually physician) who orders the medications, the pharmacist or frontline med administrator who fills it, and the frontline med administrator who administers the med to the patient at the bedside. Reconciliation issues are troublesome, whether an order gets to the pharmacy can be an issue or an inventory discrepancy between pharmacy and the frontline may mean theft, or that the frontline does not follow the provider's intentions and judgments occur. I spent last year working on a common data model that tracks this process from ordering to administration and with tracing information for when one of those three perspectives are subverted, because a unified model of medication inpatient administration allows for process intervention in all aspects of the med use process.
Statement A is management, but also, focuses on the tools and me rather than the problem. There is no context given to the problem, and I sound like a technician. Statement B is the one that I give to normal professionals who are not specialists in the field (I have a specific jargon-heavy but extremely precise elevator talk for my real peers and those who fund my work when I do wear the research hat).
2. Always speak or write in forward looking statements as you should be a walking, talking advertisement about your work rather than about you. This is the way I talk about my research time to my peers.
C.
There are at least three perspectives on inpatient medications that do not necessarily reconcile: the provider (usually physician) who orders the medications, the pharmacist or frontline med administrator who fills it, and the frontline med administrator who administers the med to the patient at the bedside. We are working on a generalizable common data model, and we have a version that tracks the process from intention to execution right now. What we are discovering are all the ways that the process gets subverted (frontline takes immediate action with a STAT dose, pharmacy stocks out of a drug and does an in-place change, providers change their mind and cancel or reroute orders). Alongside testing the normal scenarios that should occur from provider to pharmacy to patient, we are extending the model to account for exceptions and in-practice process subversions which extends the generalizability of the model beyond a research flat file into an operations process flow adaptable to multiple components such as cursory data analysis (one who just needs a list of the inpatient meds) and process analysis (for the exceptions to a particular arm of practice such as a focus on ordering or a focus on conversions).
The best research statements talk about a past problem, a present working solution, and a future potential for an even better solution.
Now, revise what you wrote for your research statement in light of that. If you cannot, then that is what your problem is for a research statement, but if you cannot make one work, you cannot admit for PhD work. The book I usually recommend to prospective graduate students is Getting What You Came For by Peters. It's old, but the advice is still very sound.
