ABSTRACT
Background/Objective: The Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program aims to enhance the quality, efficiency, and impact of translation from discovery to interventions that improve human health. CTSA program hubs at medical research institutions across the United States develop and test innovative tools, methods, and processes, offering core resources and training for the clinical and translational research (CTR) workforce. Hubs have developed services across different domains, such as informatics and pilot studies, to provide ad hoc expertise and staffing for local research teams. Although these services can provide efficient, cost-effective ways to cover skills gaps and implement rigorous studies, three CTSAs of varying size found the majority of investigators were single domain service users, likely missing opportunities to further enhance their work. Methods: Through interviews with CTSA service users and a survey of CTSA service managers, this exploratory study aims to identify barriers to using services from multiple modules and solutions to overcome those barriers. Results: Barriers include challenges in finding information about services, unclear or unknown user needs, and users' lack of funding to engage in services. More issues were identified for the largest CTSA. Conclusions: Although this study represents a small subset of CTSA hubs, we anticipate that our findings and proposed solutions will be relevant to the broader CTSA community. This study provides foundational information can use in their own efforts to increase service utilization and methods that can be used for more comprehensive studies that focus on explaining the relationship between CTSA features and rates of single versus cross-module service use.
ABSTRACT
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1017/cts.2019.387.].
ABSTRACT
The purpose of the article is to describe the progress of the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program to address the evaluation-related recommendations made by the 2013 Institute of Medicine's review of the CTSA Program and guidelines published in CTS Journal the same year (Trochim et al., Clinical and Translational Science 2013; 6(4): 303-309). We utilize data from a 2018 national survey of evaluators administered to all 64 CTSA hubs and a content analysis of the role of evaluation in the CTSA Program Funding Opportunity Announcements to document progress. We present four new opportunities for further strengthening CTSA evaluation efforts: (1) continue to build the collaborative evaluation infrastructure at local and national levels; (2) make better use of existing data; (3) strengthen and augment the common metrics initiative; and (4) pursue internal and external opportunities to evaluate the CTSA program at the national level. This article will be of significant interest to the funders of the CTSA Program and the multiple stakeholders in the larger consortium and will promote dialog from the broad range of CTSA stakeholders about further strengthening the CTSA Program's evaluation.
