Abstract
Background/Aims In September 2012, NIH funded the Health Care Systems (HCS) Research Collaboratory to engage health care systems as research partners in conducting large-scale pragmatic clinical studies. The goals of the HSC Collaboratory are to provide leadership and technical expertise to support innovative pragmatic clinical trials leveraging health information technology, specifically electronic health records (EHRs), in partnership within health care delivery systems.
Methods The HSC Collaboratory currently consists of a Coordinating Center and seven funded pragmatic trials. The HMORN plays a major role both in the Coordinating Center and in four of the initial seven funded trials. We describe the HMORN contribution to the Coordinating Center.
Results The HCS Coordinating Center cores provide technical expertise and support to Collaboratory investigators and their health care system partners; develop technical and policy guidelines to advance research in health care systems; and disseminate lessons learned. The HMORN is leading two cores: the IT core (led by the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute) is developing the NIH Distributed Research Network and is also responsible for providing tools for extracting information from EHRs and for data sharing; the Health Systems Interaction Core (led by the Group Health Research Institute) is responsible for optimizing research interactions with health care delivery organizations. HPHCI and GHRI also participate in the biostatistics core. Additional Coordinating Center activities include defining clinical phenotypes in EHRs; engaging stakeholders and promoting participation by all relevant communities; creating reusable, sustainable models for incorporation of patient reported outcomes; and addressing ethical considerations arising in the conduct of health system based research.
Conclusions The NIH HCS Research Collaboratory program is advancing the nation’s capacity for cost-effective, large-scale, pragmatic clinical studies. The HMORN leads several aspects of this work and can directly benefit from the Collaboratory’s activities as the scope of resources expands to support additional delivery system based research activities.
