Strategies for Academic and Clinician Engagement in Community-Participatory Partnered Research

THERE HAVE BEEN RECENT PRACTICE AND POLICY CONcerns over the “quality chasm,” or gap between the promise of evidence-based medicine and the realities of community practice with little variation by geographic and sociodemographic factors. Studies document disparities in access of care for particular conditions, and there is widespread concern about disparities in health status and health risk factors disadvantaging underserved ethnic minority and lower-socioeconomic status groups. Addressing quality gaps and health disparities will require implementation of programs to address social determinants of health and improve services delivery across diverse communities. Doing so for underserved communities may be especially challenging owing to resource constraints, underdevelopment of research, and historical distrust in research and health care in some groups. Experts recommend promoting public participation and engagement of diverse communities in research as a strategy to enhance its relevance and to address disparities more effectively Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is the prevailing paradigm to facilitate these goals by promoting mutual transfer of expertise and power sharing in decision making and data ownership across community and academic partners. A recent review identified relatively few English-language CBPR studies in health but wide variation in extent and type of participation. Community-based participatory research has been used more as a paradigm for public health than for clinical or health services research. Many features of CBPR—such as spending time in the community, power sharing, and action research methods—might challenge physicians, given their clinical training that often requires interactions under time pressure, the hierarchical structure of academic medicine, and the focus of medical research on controlled trials as the standard for evidence. However, opportunities (such as the recent National Institutes of Health announcement for CBPR research http://grants.nih.gov/grants /guide/pa-files/PAR-07-004.html) are emerging for conducting CBPR in substantive areas for which physician leadership could be helpful. It is timely to familiarize clinical investigators with principles of participatory research and to offer strategies to build effective research partnerships that facilitate clinician leadership in efforts to improve health for all communities. Over several years, we collaborated in exploring ways of blending concepts and approaches from clinical services research and CBPR in research initiatives, research training of physicians in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program (http://www.hsrcenter.ucla.edu/csp), and a multicenter effort to develop infrastructure to support community-based research. This approach is based on community-partnered participatory research (CPPR), a form of CBPR developed by Healthy African American Families and Charles R. Drew Medical University with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that emphasizes authentic community-academic partnerships as distinct from many collaborative research activities conducted at community sites without partnership in design, implementation, or product ownership. In collaboration with Keith Norris and Paul Koegel, we blended this model with methods from services research initiatives, such as Partners in Care, that addressed quality disparities. Communitypartnered participatory research promotes equal community and academic partnership and power sharing in all phases of research, grounded in evidence-based practice as defined from academic and community perspectives, a framing of CBPR that is suited to physician coleadership. This Commentary provides lessons learned from these applications. Recent examples are available at http://www .communitytrial.org. Many components of CPPR are partly based on CBPR models but are organized into a particular approach.