Research and Practice Team Engagement: A Checklist to Enhance Research and Practice Team Collaboration

RODGER KESSLER, PhD, ABPP
Professor, Arizona State University

This poster describes a strategy to develop shared understanding between research and practice teams. Often, during the conduct of on the ground practice research, issues arise from assumptions between research and clinical teams that interrupt and often threaten projects viability and impact. Many of these issues can be identified and addressed in the implementation planning and we generated a brief checklist to be completed collaboratively by research and practice team members, to generate shared assumptions and implementation expectations. We are currently testing this work in one community implementation project. Practice-based research often includes partners with limited capacity for research participation. There may be no protected time for research; IRB policies or communication lines between research administration and clinical management may not be clear. This may lead to different assumptions or expectations that may impede the project. Checklists are a common feature in manufacturing and a growing feature in health care systems, including research. However, most practice-based checklists do not mutually engage researchers and partners collaboratively, are lengthy, and do not examine and clarify assumptions and solutions to identified challenges. The purpose of this pragmatic checklist is to increase the chance of collaboration success by identifying and resolving unclear assumptions and expectations.

The application of this work is an Arizona Health System that owns and contracts with primary care practices. They initiated development of a primary care/ academic researcher team to engage in care and practice improvement by implementing evidence supported care pathways.

We generated a 12 item checklist based on a careful review of existing scientific literature, our own experience, and constructs from the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR). Table 1 Identifies the 12 content domains. It is completed together by research and practice teams, identifies areas of consensus and those needing further resolution and key members from both teams to further discuss and generate resolution strategies to then be reviewed and endorsed by the full team. It includes four crucial time events: Before Signing a Memorandum of Agreement; Before Submitting to the IRB; Before Entering the Setting; and Before Collecting Data.

Researcher teams can use the checklist to verify whether the relationship with the community partner is clear, and to identify any potential problems and support team consensus. We are currently using the checklist in an Arizona State University research team collaboration with a local primary care setting and will report on results.