The ultimate goal of this 2 year NIH-NHLBI RC2 GO Grant (RFA-OD-09-004), """"""""Comparative Effectiveness"""""""", is to develop a web system that facilitates Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) to identify populations underrepresented in research. This effort builds on our 20 year community based model. Recently scaled up for the Washington University's Clinical &Translational Science Award (CTSA), our community based model called Health Street is a one-stop portal of entry for navigating underrepresented populations (URPs) to social, medical and psychiatric services, and to research opportunities. Health Street relies on Community Health Workers (CHWs) for engagement and is complementary to planned national self-guided participant registries. The deliverables will be the model, its protocols and manuals, and its concomitant web system that automates its work flow;they would be made available for replication nationally. The system will be an important component of the recruitment armamentarium to boost URPs in research. A web system to track and facilitate all functions of this approach, along with all decision logic, is mandatory to scale up the effort for better efficiency of field-based recruitment on a local and national level.
Specific Aim 1. Refine the workflow for our novel Health Street model, to reduce disparities in research participation, and make it complementary to both local and national registry based efforts.
Specific Aim 2. Design and develop a sophisticated web system that automates all of the work flow described above and allows CHWs to capture individual data from underrepresented populations, from portal of entry forward. It will also longitudinally track need for services, health priorities and concerns, risk factors, referrals made, Health Street services provided, and community recruitment, navigation, and enrollment rates.
Specific Aim 3. Test the web system for relevance locally with the input of the CHWs, the Recruitment Enhancement and Bio-Informatics Cores, and the local Community Advisory Board;and nationally with the input of the Program Advisory Board and CTSA Community Engagement Cores.
Specific Aim 4. Make the web system available nationally;begin a Sentinel Network for ongoing multi-site monitoring of increased enrollment of URPs into relevant research studies.
Specific Aim 5. Plan a collaborative comparative effectiveness study of the web system vs current models to longitudinally monitor recruitment, navigation, enrollment and retention yields among URPs. This pioneering work can be accomplished in 2 years, and will have a substantial transformative and sustainable impact as it brings research from the bench and bedside to the """"""""curbside"""""""".
The public health impact of the Health Street approach to recruit more underrepresented populations into research and link them to needed services is significant. When samples enrolled for research studies are comprised of diverse populations, there is greater generalizability and applicability of the findings to the larger population to which they relate. This increases the effectiveness and speedy approval of treatments and interventions that are tested in various research studies, thereby positively impacting public health outcomes. Thus, the use of a comprehensive web system, deployed by Community Health Workers, and based on the principles of community based participatory research, is pioneering.
| Reingle, Jennifer M; Jennings, Wesley G; Maldonado-Molina, Mildred M (2012) Risk and Protective Factors for Trajectories of Violent Delinquency Among a Nationally Representative Sample of Early Adolescents. Youth Violence Juv Justice 10:261-277 |
| Cottler, Linda B; Nagarajan, Rakesh (2012) Real-time assessment of community health needs and concerns. Sci Transl Med 4:119mr2 |
