The Texas Medical Center Regional Coordinating Center for Heart Failure The proposed Texas Medical Center (TMC) Regional Coordinating Center (RCC) will be comprised of nine separate sites that are housed on the campus of the Texas Medical Center (www.tmc.edu), one of the largest incorporated medical centers in the world, with 42 not-for-profit institutions including 13 hospitals, two medical schools, two graduate schools of biomedical sciences, a dental school, four nursing schools, a school of public health, a college of pharmacy, a hospice facility, a geriatric center, a psychiatric center, and a forensic medical center, all located on the same campus. There are over 5,000,000 patient visits to the TMC, annually, which makes the TMC an ideal site to conduct clinical trials. Moreover, the racial and ethnic diversity within the TMC lends itself well to conducting clinical trials. The scientific and administrative base of this proposed RCC will be at Baylor College of Medicine. The nine sites in the TMC RCC are in close proximity to one another (see Figure 1), and most are attached by skywalks and tunnels that facilitate the interaction and collaboration between the sites. The patient characteristics, experience in clinical research in heart failure and enrollment capacity for heart failure clinical trials at each of the participating institutions is outstanding. Finally, the proposed TMC RCC has a number of unique features that are ideally suited for the NIH heart failure research network, including close proximity of all participating Institutions to one another such that a single research coordinator can recruit from all sites in the TMC network, sufficient racial diversity of the patient population to ensure adequate recruitment of minorities and women, a mixture of community and teaching hospitals, pediatric and adult hospitals, and specialty hospitals (e.g. MD Anderson), each of which has a very high patient volume for adult and pediatric heart failure. Finally the TMC RCC will be overseen by Dr. Douglas Mann, who has experience with phase I - IV clinical trials, and who has close working relationship with of the investigators in the proposed TMC RCC by virtue of his 14 year tenure in the Texas Medical Center.
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