SEATTLE—Group Health Research Institute and its partners—the University of Washington, Institute of Translational Health Sciences, Duke Translational Medicine Institute, and Wayne State University—have developed a new website to help researchers create and sustain successful multisite research collaborations. The project team created the site, www.researchtoolkit.org, to enhance the efficiency of research from start to finish, including developing research networks, launching and managing projects, and sharing study results or other products such as data sets, tools, and training resources.
Researchers are increasingly finding strength in unity. By collaborating with investigators at multiple sites, they can pool their data and study larger and more diverse groups of people in various settings. Collaboration helps studies achieve more "generalizability" (to other populations and settings) and greater statistical power. This makes it easier to definitively answer pressing questions about which kinds of health care work best to improve the health of Americans. The downside of multisite collaboration is logistical difficulties, which the new website aims to ease.
"ResearchToolkit.org will enable clinical investigators from multiple institutions to collaborate more efficiently and effectively on health research," said National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) Director Barbara M. Alving, MD. "Ultimately, this new, Web-based resource may help improve community engagement nationwide." The development of the research toolkit was funded by the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program, which is led by NCRR, part of the National Institutes of Health. The CTSA program fosters collaboration to speed the translation of research into practice and to engage communities in clinical research.
To ensure the website content is maximally useful, the team surveyed members of the CTSA program who conduct community-based research, along with leaders of Practice-Based Research Networks (PBRNs). As part of the survey, respondents were invited to contribute resources of their own, and identify unmet needs and barriers to doing research efficiently.
"The result is a site built by the researchers, for the researchers," said lead investigator Sarah Greene, MPH, a research associate at Group Health Research Institute.
Programs such as the National Institutes of Health's CTSA initiative and its recent Grand Opportunities (GO) funding opportunity have spurred substantial growth in multicenter research, she explained. "This means today's researchers are challenged to quickly surmount the logistical and operational barriers to project development. We built the ResearchToolkit.org site to help them."
The website was developed as part of a project known as PRIMER, or Partnership-driven Resources to IMprove and Enhance Research. PRIMER was awarded to the Institute for Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) at the University of Washington by the NCRR. The study team included researchers from Group Health Research Institute and the University of Washington (both in Seattle, WA), Duke University (Durham, NC), and Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). "The partnership among our teams ultimately helped strengthen the final product," according to collaborating investigator Anne Victoria Neale, PhD, MPH, a professor at Wayne State.
"Working with multiple sites on budgeting, developing the science, initiating the research study, and writing manuscripts can be especially challenging" noted Rowena Dolor, MD, MHS, co-investigator and primary care research network director from Duke University Medical Center. The "toolkit" on the website spans the entire lifecycle of a research project, allowing visitors to find to everything from a link to regulatory training, to authorship guidelines, to templates for consent forms. Responses from survey participants and systematic searches of existing large research networks helped the team identify which tools to include.
Having these resources reside on a single website is an efficiency measure itself. "There's no need for researchers and project teams to start from scratch," said Laura-Mae Baldwin, MD, MPH, a co-investigator on the project, University of Washington professor of family medicine, and practicing clinician.
Sponsors:
Clinical and Translational Science Awards
The National Institutes of Health's Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) currently support 46 medical research institutions sharing a common vision: to reduce the time it takes laboratory discoveries to become treatments for patients, engage communities in clinical research efforts, and train a new generation of clinical researchers: www.ctsaweb.org.
National Center for Research Resources
The National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a part of the National Institutes of Health, provides laboratory scientists and clinical researchers with the resources and training they need to understand, detect, treat, and prevent a wide range of diseases. NCRR supports all aspects of translational and clinical research, connecting researchers, patients, and communities across the nation: www.ncrr.nih.gov
Institutional Homes of Researchers on Team
Duke Translational Medicine Institute
The Duke Translational Medicine Institute (DTMI) is Duke's academic home for the clinical and translational research community. It is an integrated support structure that provides resources and training and facilitates collaborative research in clinical and translational research. Its mission is to catalyze translation across the continuum of scientific discovery, clinical research, care delivery, and global health: www.dtmi.duke.edu
Group Health Research Institute
Founded in 1947, Group Health Cooperative is a Seattle-based, consumer-governed, nonprofit health care system. Group Health Research Institute changed its name from Group Health Center for Health Studies on September 8, 2009. Since 1983, the Institute has conducted nonproprietary public-interest research on preventing, diagnosing, and treating major health problems. Government and private research grants provide its main funding: www.grouphealthresearch.org.
Institute of Translational Health Sciences
The Institute of Translational Health Sciences helps researchers obtain the education, resources, and collaborations necessary to translate discoveries into practice. The Institute is a partnership among the University of Washington (UW), Seattle Children's, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), and other regional institutions dedicated to improving human health. To achieve this goal requires collaboration between many groups: academia, industry, nonprofit agencies, government, and most importantly the community. Any researcher or individual interested in translational research from any group is invited to become a member of the ITHS. The ITHS is part of a new national consortium, the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA): www.iths.org
University of Washington
The University of Washington has grown into the most successful public research university in the nation in attracting support for research. The University has a proud culture of innovation, collaboration, and discovery that has transformational impact: http://uwmedicine.washington.edu
Wayne State University
Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world: www.research.wayne.edu.