In this application, we describe a new community partnership entitled Collaborative Research Efforts Aimed at Translating Evidence and building Community Capacity (CREATE Community Capacity). The Oregon Health &Science University (OHSU) and OCHIN (a community-based, non-profit safety net clinic network and information technology organization) propose to jointly develop infrastructure to support research that will leverage OHSU's established research expertise with OCHIN's electronically linked network of community-based health centers (including two OHSU community clinics). This infrastructure will enable us to build capacity for conducting translational and practice redesign in safety net settings throughout the U.S. west coast-the """"""""Safety Net West."""""""" As OCHIN's membership expands and its collective database of clinical encounters grows, so will the CREATE collaborative's capacity to conduct research to better understand the needs of underserved patient populations, - including epidemiologic studies that include uninsured patients, quality improvement studies, clinical and behavioral interventions, and much more. The infrastructure proposed herein will enable OCHIN's community-based health centers (a majority of which are FQHCs) to directly inform, and benefit from, research designed to determine how changes in clinical practice influence health outcomes in safety net patient populations locally and regionally, and potentially nationwide. There are four main project aims:
Aim 1 : Formally pair Community Research Associates at OCHIN with OHSU researchers and establish schedules for on-site collaborative work.
Aim 2 : Establish a proposal development committee that includes OCHIN clinicians, OCHIN patients, community representatives, state policy makers and researchers.
Aim 3 : Develop and submit research proposals of interest to, and in collaboration with, our community partners and academic researchers.
Aim 4 : Convene yearly community retreats to build the consortium. The proposed project will leverage leading health information technologies to transform primary care delivery. It will develop research capacity to capitalize on a large database of uninsured and underinsured patient records available to researchers who can readily access the data to develop and confirm hypotheses about the quality of care provided to our most underserved patients. The impact of the project cannot be overstated, as the information gleaned from this data will be used to directly inform 1) research conducted in collaboration between OCHIN and Oregon's only academic health center, and 2) how those research practices and findings can be translated into the OCHIN community, and other safety net communities across the nation.
Through this innovative project, Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) and Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research (Kaiser CHR) will partner with OCHIN, a HRSA-funded Health-Center Controlled Network comprised of over 200 clinic sites in four states (Oregon, California, Washington, and Ohio) who share one common electronic health record. This partnership will create a bidirectional transfer of research knowledge and expertise between OHSU, Kaiser CHR, and OCHIN that ensures the development of a unique, sustainable infrastructure to support OCHIN's involvement as a partner in community research activities. Simultaneous to infrastructure-building activities, the team will begin building a research portfolio, based on OCHIN's interests and primary populations, with the full involvement of community providers and patients. OHSU - CREATE Community Capacity Narrative Summary
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