Are you interested in working with other site investigators to expand your research? Are you interested in serving as a site investigator on a multisite study? There are ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ opportunities to participate in multisite trials. The CTSI connects investigators at UF and other institutions to several resources available to support and participate in multisite studies, including the Trial Innovation Network’s SMART IRB, and the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium. The UF contacts listed under each resource below can help you get started.
Trial Innovation Network
A collaborative initiative within the CTSA Program, the Trial Innovation Network comprises three key organizational partners: the CTSA Program hubs, the Trial Innovation Centers, and the Recruitment Innovation Center. The national network focuses on operational innovation, excellence and collaboration to leverage the expertise and resources of the CTSA program.
The UF CTSI Recruitment Center serves as the liaison to the Trial Innovation Network and Recruitment Innovation Centers, and will contribute to the science of recruitment with an emphasis on participation of special populations, the use of innovative methods to disseminate messages about research and its findings, and the engagement of communities in methods to recruit and retain participants into health research that is relevant to them.
SMART IRB
Part of the Trial Innovation Network, SMART IRB is a platform designed to ease common challenges associated with initiating multisite research and to provide a roadmap for institutions to implement the NIH Single IRB Review policy. Freely available for institutions and investigators, SMART IRB is an integrated, comprehensive platform that allows flexibility in the size and scope of collaboration to enable IRB reliance for multisite studies across the nation, regardless of funding status. UF is one of more than 250 participating institutions.
The traditional IRB review process — individual IRB approval at each study site — has been shown to be duplicative, cause significant delays in study initiation, and result in varying IRB determinations across study sites. In response, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services in 2016 and 2017, respectively, released new policies requiring the use of a single IRB review for multisite studies.
Contact
Renee Collins
OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium
The OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium is a collaboration representing researchers, clinicians and patients that aims to improve health across the state through community-based clinical research projects. Consortium partners include the University of Florida, Florida State University and the University of Miami, creating a network that extends to all of Florida’s 67 counties and encompasses more than 10 million patients. Together, OneFlorida partners cover 39 percent of the patient population in the nation’s third-largest state.
Contact
Use the One Florida Front Door to get started with this resource.
ACT Network (NCATS Accrual to Clinical Trials)
The ACT Network is a real-time, open-access platform allowing researchers throughout the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) consortium to explore and validate feasibility for clinical studies using electronic health record data. ACT is NIH-funded and HIPAA-compliant. ACT was developed collaboratively by CTSA hubs (with funding from NCATS) to help investigators more efficiently develop and validate parameters for clinical studies. The ACT Network contains more than 125M patient records and de-identified data from 48 CTSAs across the country, expanding to ~90% of the CTSA consortium in 2020.
Using ACT, investigators can:
- Explore patient populations in depth, in real time, from their desktop.
- Confirm study feasibility by iteratively testing and refining inclusion and exclusion criteria.
- Demonstrate study feasibility in funding proposals and IRB submissions.
- Identify potential partners for multi-site studies by searching for patients across the CTSA network.
The ACT Network is open access and available to all researchers at the University of Florida as well as other participating CTSAs at no cost.
Contact
To learn more about ACT and request data access, go to www.actnetwork.us/FloridaCTSI