Family Medicine Associate Professor Justine Wu, M.D., MPH, and Assistant Professor Paul Chandanabhumma, Ph.D., MPH, have been awarded a Clinical and Translational Science (CTS) Pilot Award though the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR) for their project, “Engagement, Recruitment, and Retention of Racial and Ethnic Minority Participants in Research: Promoting Equity in Clinical and Translational Science.” Both will serve as co-principal investigators on the project.
Fellow Family Medicine co-investigators include Postdoctoral Research Fellow Analay Perez, Ph.D. and Research Analyst Laura Monkman, Ph.D. Design Researcher Sarah Miles, MSW, MDes, member of the Human Centered Design team at MICHR, is moderating the e-Delphi panel meetings, which are part of data collection.
Clinical and Translational Science (CTS) drives the discovery of innovative, life-altering, and life-saving health treatments and solutions, according to the team. For too long, however, racial and ethnic minorities have been underrepresented in CTS and health research more broadly, which in turn slows down or hinders equitable access to scientific discoveries, they added.
"If study participants do not reflect the diversity of the U.S. population, we are forced to extrapolate findings derived from largely White, non-Hispanic participants to racial and ethnic minority patients and communities. This practice can lead to harmful misapplications of therapeutics and interventions,” Wu said.
The goal of the study is to generate best practice recommendations to promote the equitable inclusion and engagement of racial and ethnic minorities in health research. The project commenced in May of this year and will conclude in February 2025.
To carry out this project, the team is currently convening a diverse member panel to participate in a virtual, participatory, e-Delphi study, which uses a series of questionnaires to collect and synthesize the opinions of a panel of experts on a specific topic. The project began with a literature review of best practices for the recruitment, retention, and engagement of racial and ethnic minorities in health research. Participants were then asked to evaluate these recommendations in a survey.
Through three rounds of panel meetings and surveys, the team will be able to gather quantitative and qualitative open-ended responses to further refine their recommendations.
Current panelists include researchers, community practitioners and advocates, clinical and translational science personnel (from MICHR), health equity leaders, and former clinical trial participants who have been recruited from across the United States, including Alaska and Puerto Rico. The study team remarked that 18 participating panelists have already recommended distinctive and transformative practices for promoting the equitable engagement of racial and ethnic minority communities in clinical trials.
At present, the team is also collecting and analyzing mixed methods data from the surveys and panelist meetings. They will generate an overview of generalizable principles and describe practical applications that can be applied across a wide range of clinical trials and health studies that engage with research participants.
“Through our literature review, we found that recruitment is often widely discussed in articles, but participant retention is not discussed as often,” Postdoctoral Research Fellow Perez said. “We hope to shed light on both processes and add to the existing literature on effective strategies of both, participant recruitment and retention, of racial and ethnic minorities in health studies and clinical trials.”
By the end of January, the team will finalize the recommendations and will work with MICHR in the final month of the grant to create a prototype “Blueprint for Action”.
“It’s been a rewarding and meaningful process to reflect and discuss as a team how to best recruit our panelists and to solicit their professional insights and lived experiences to develop this state-of-the-art resource,” Chandanabhumma said. “We look forward to sharing the ways that we have challenged ourselves to elevate equity in our research process above and beyond the study outcome.”
MICHR’s Clinical and Translational Science Pilot Award supports new and innovative research projects relevant to clinical & translational science (CTS). CTS is a field of investigation focused on understanding a scientific or operational principle that underlies a step of the translational process, with the goal of developing generalizable principles to accelerate translational research.
This work was supported by the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR) Pilot Grant [UM1TR004404].
