Assessing a community health center-driven process for engaging with translational scientists: what will it take?
Date
2025
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Battaglia TA, King KI, Richmond A, et al. Assessing A Community Health Center Driven Process for Engaging with Translational Scientists: What Will It Take? Journal of Clinical and Translational Science. Published online 2025:1-20. doi:10.1017/cts.2025.10058
Abstract
Actively engaging community health centers (CHCs) in research is necessary to ensure evidence-based practices are relevant to all communities and get us closer to closing the health equity gap. We report here on the Boston HealthNet Research Collaborative, a partnership between health centers, Boston HealthNet and the Boston University Clinical, and Translational Science Institute with the explicit goal of supporting research partnerships early in the planning phase of the study lifecycle. We used the principles of community engagement guided by a collective impact framework to codesign, pilot, and evaluate a process for facilitating research partnerships. Accomplishments in the first 2 years include a web-based Toolkit with a step-by-step guide and an active learning collaborative with health center representatives to support research capacity building. The process resulted in 81 new research project partnerships across 50 individual research projects. Most research partnership requests were made later in the research lifecycle, after the planning phase. Partnership acceptance was largely driven by the Collaborative’s pre-defined Guiding Principles and Rules of Engagement. These lessons drive an iterative process to improve the longitudinal relationship between our translational research program and our CHC partners.
Description
License
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Clinical and Translational Science. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.