The recent rapid acceleration of basic science is reshaping both our clinical research system and our healthcare delivery system. The pace and growing volume of medical discoveries are yielding exciting new opportunities, yet we continue to face old challenges to maintain research progress and effectively translate research into practice. The National Institutes of Health and individual government programs increasingly are emphasizing research agendas that involve evidence development, comparative-effectiveness research among heterogeneous populations, translational research, and accelerating the translation of research into evidence-based practice as well as building successful research networks to support these efforts. For more than 25 years, the National Cancer Institute Community Clinical Oncology Program has successfully extended research into the community and facilitated the translation of research into evidence-based practice. By describing its keys to success, this article provides practical guidance to cancer-focused, provider-based research networks as well as those in other disciplines. Cancer 2010;116:4440-9. V C 2010 American Cancer Society.KEYWORDS: translational research, evidence-based medicine, research and technology, organization and delivery of care, quality of care.Clinical research and medicine have entered a time of great promise, but they also are faced with new challenges. The rapid acceleration of basic science, including advances in genomics and proteomics, are elucidating mechanisms of disease, yielding new methods to identify and potentially treat abnormalities, and effectively are transforming acute diseases into chronic diseases. These advances signify substantial progress in our national research endeavor; however, they simultaneously are reshaping not only the entire clinical research system but also our healthcare delivery system and the practice of clinical medicine. The pace and volume of medical discoveries and evolving clinical practice and corresponding policy require the development of new evidence in comparative effectiveness and outcomes, which recently have experienced tremendous increases in investment through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and other substantial efforts. 1,2 Thus, as we proceed through this transformation and face new research and clinical practice demands, the question of how best to improve the translation of clinical research into clinical practice remains unanswered, and the substantial discovery-delivery gap remains.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the NIH Roadmap Initiative (the Roadmap) to address these challenges and other needs in the scientific community. 3 Through the Roadmap, as 1 means of restructuring its clinical research enterprise, the NIH is exploring practice-based research networks (PBRNs) to pursue the twin goals of accelerating science and facilitating the translation of research into practice. [4][5][6]
Understanding how health care system structures, processes, and available resources facilitate and/or hinder the delivery of quality cancer care is imperative, especially given the rapidly changing health care landscape. The emerging field of cancer care delivery research (CCDR) focuses on how organizational structures and processes, care delivery models, financing and reimbursement, health technologies, and health care provider and patient knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors influence cancer care quality, cost, and access and ultimately the health outcomes and well-being of patients and survivors. In this article, we describe attributes of CCDR, present examples of studies that illustrate those attributes, and discuss the potential impact of CCDR in addressing disparities in care. We conclude by emphasizing the need for collaborative research that links academic and community-based settings and serves simultaneously to accelerate the translation of CCDR results into practice. The National Cancer Institute recently launched its Community Oncology Research Program, which includes a focus on this area of research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.