The Coordinated Clinical Studies Network: A Multidisciplinary Alliance to Facilitate Research and Improve Care.

Abstract

The NIH Roadmap is a major effort to reshape the US health research enterprise to accelerate medical discovery and to do so in such a way that actually hastens population health improvement through research. The Roadmap's ultimate goal resonates with the HMO Research Network, a consortium of integrated health care systems that uses its collective scientific capabilities to integrate research, practice, and policy for the improvement of health and health care among diverse populations. (See page 6 for abstracts from the HMO Research Network annual conference.) As such, the HMO Research Network was ideally suited to propose a new consortium project as a part of the NIH Roadmap, the Coordinated Clinical Studies Network (CCSN). The CCSN was funded in 2004 to create a path-breaking research facility that leverages several distinctive features of the HMO Research Network: the multidisciplinary scientific capabilities of its researchers; the ability to rapidly move clinical research findings into care delivery; its large, diverse patient populations; and a commitment to placing its findings in the public domain. Among the goals of the CCSN are to augment the capacity and infrastructure for conducting research, and to use considerable investments in health informatics to improve the scope and efficiency of research data collection. The NIH Roadmap is a revolutionary step toward a new paradigm for research and responds to both a compelling social need and rapid technological advances in biomedicine. The CCSN's participation in the Roadmap Initiative is a unique opportunity for researchers, clinicians, and our patients.effort on the part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), dubbed the NIH Roadmap. The Roadmap is designed to accelerate progress on pressing scientific questions, synergistically leverage the NIH research agenda to address these questions, remove impediments to efficiently conducting research, and facilitate uptake in everyday clinical practice. Roadmap activities are vast initiatives (http://nihroadmap.nih.gov). Each is based in the director's office and administered through a single designated institute. However, each initiative involves all institutes of NIH and importantly, each one is funded from agreed-upon contributions from individual institutes' budgets. Research Partnerships with Community PartnersAn important pillar in the NIH Roadmap is the initiative, "Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise." This endeavor is designed to spur new research partnerships between researchers and community practices that care for large, diverse patient populations.1 This initiative resonated with the members of the HMO Research Network (HMORN), a consortium of 14 health plans situated across all regions of the US, including six Kaiser Permanente (KP) Regions. All of the HMORN members have formal, recognized research capabilities, and a commitment to using their collective scien- Integrating and Expanding the Research EnterpriseThe US national landscape for conducting clinical and health service...

Sustaining Research Networks: the Twenty-Year Experience of the HMO Research Network

“…Funding from the NIH Roadmap Initiative in 2004 helped the HMORN refine its approach to data governance, contracting and IRB review. 20 , 21 Based on this infrastructure, HMORN investigators led 3 of 11 projects funded by AHRQ under its electronic data infrastructure and methods initiative from 2010–2013, 14 , 22 , 23 and are leading or participating in 5 of 7 pragmatic clinical trials in the NIH Health Systems Collaboratory. 9 A network of 9 HMORN sites (along with one safety-net delivery system) is also participating in PCORnet.…”