Community Health Applied Research Network: A marriage of community health centers with academic health centers

Background: Health centers provide care to approximately 20 million people and have worked collaboratively to develop clinical data infrastructure, and design models of care to improve the practice and quality of care. However, there is little understanding of how these innovative care and data management practices work individually and interact wihtin and across in safety-net settings. Specifically, there is the need to better understand and contextualize the different approaches to organizing and delivering care within the safety-net. In addition, populations served by the safety net providers are often underrepresented in large scale studies.

Purpose: The purpose of the session is to provide an overview of the Community Health Applied Research Network (CHARN) is a consortium of community-based providers, that was funded in September 2010 to develop a national resource to conduct large scale collaborative research in community health centers and HIV clinics.

Methods: The presenter will describe CHARN's organizational structure which marries the enhanced electronic capability of safety net providers with the research expertise of academic health centers. The presenter will illustrate the connections between the CHARN and Institute of Medicine recommendations to invest in building robust data and information systems, to strengthen the research infrastructure, and to bring scientific knowledge into everyday clinical decision-making.

Results: The CHARN has begun to create the infrastructure that helps illuminate the healthcare experience of patients across different sites and treatments; develop improved approaches for transferring research findings into practice; and foster practice-based collaboration among clinic and center personnel, practitioners, and researchers.