CBPR: Leveling the playing field

An interactive, GIS-enabled, health disparities web portal and informatics infrastructure were established to facilitate and support community-based participatory research (CBPR). This web portal was established to provide equal access to baseline data on health outcomes at a neighborhood level together with contextual data about the physical, built and social environments to better enable its interpretation. The web portal was developed using a GIS-enabled software program. The web portal enables CBPR by providing the infrastructure to link community partners with students enrolled in inter-disciplinary health professions training programs with research requirements and allowing for uploading and downloading of data by both academic and community partners. To date, the web portal and informatics infrastructure to collect, store, analyze, and disseminate data that supports public participatory research on health disparities in Nashville/Davidson County, TN have been established. It is our expectation that over time, web portal will enable and sustain CBPR by providing community members with access to data that can be used to initiate or participate in meaningful and measurable interventions that make a difference in their lives and the lives of their, families, friends and neighbors. Having access to neighborhood level data on health disparities at a neighborhood level will enable communities to use and prioritize health issues and to recruit university-based researchers who have expertise in the area and who they trust. When this happens, the playing field for conducting CBPR truly will be leveled.