2024 Fall CTSA Meeting Poster Awards and Boston HealthNet Research Collaborative Highlights

On November 14^th, Kareem King, BA presented at the Fall CTSA Annual Meeting on behalf of the BU CTSI. As a research program manager with the Community Engagement Program, his work is focused on engaging with community partners and local health centers to inform clinical research at BU and BMC. At the Annual Meeting, he presented on the Boston HealthNet Research Collaborative and received the Best in Show Awardfor his presentation.

The Boston HealthNet has been around since 1995. It is an integrated health care delivery system that encompasses Boston Medical Center and 13 local health centers. In 2021, 9 of those health centers, the BU CTSI, and BMC’s Clinical Research Network came together to form the Boston HealthNet Research Collaborative. The goal of this initiative was to foster partnerships between researchers and local health centers to advance health equity.

Community health centers serve 1 in 11 people nationwide (32.5 million patients in 2021), the majority of whom are low income, underserved, and underinsured. Yet, they remain sorely underrepresented in research. That means a significant amount of the population we should be trying to reach with access to clinical trials and new medical innovations is missing from the conversation.  Our collaborators came together in 2021 to begin addressing this barrier in the Boston community, through a process that was co-developed with community health centers. It involves 1)understanding CHC expectations 2) identifying CHCs that align with research goals, 3)filling out an online partnership request 4)Communicating with a designed person at each health center about the study and 5) getting final approval from health centers to move forward.

Through a year-long planning process, the BHN Research Collaborative hosted four retreats to develop tools that would assist with this process. These meetings were attended by health center leadership, representatives from BU CTSI, BMC, and researchers. The tools developed included guiding principles and rules of engagement, individual biographies for each health center, an online Qualtrics request form, and an IRB approval form. All of this was managed under the Research Liaison, a person at each health center who was designated to field requests and build research infrastructure at their center, supported by BU and BMC. This process was officially implemented in 2021. Tracy Battaglia, the past Co-Director of the BU CTSI Community Engagement Program, was integral to this work. She was at BU medical school more than a decade, and played an active role in earlier initiatives to get health centers more involved in academic research. Other actors that have been integral to this work include Charlie Williams, Bill Adams, Erika Christenson, Allyson Richmond, Ryan Schroeder, Quinneil Simmons, Rebecca Lobb, and Astraea Augsberger.

As of November 2024, 69 individual research projects have been submitted to the Research Collaborative. The investigators range from trainees and junior faculty to full professors. These requests have led to the formation of more than 110 health center research partnerships, across the 8 currently participating health centers. Types of engagement with these partnerships include deidentified patient data requests, site recruitment for studies, or co-developed research projects between a researcher and the health center. As we head into 2025, the CTSI will continue to build on this process and foster deeper relationships with our health center partners in BHN and at BMC.

If you’re interested in learning more about the BHN Research Collaborative, you can find more information here. You can also reach out to Kareem King (kking11@bu.edu).