New Consortium Products Further CTSA Mission and Offer Valuable Tools
CTSA consortium efforts are yielding substantial output this year. In the past few months, several Key Function Committees (KFCs) finalized the following products, advancing progress towards the consortium's five strategic goals:
- The Education and Career Development KFC developed core competencies that will become the foundation for competency-based educational curricula for training clinician-scientists in the discipline of clinical and translational science.
- The Public-Private Partnership KFC launched a web-based intellectual property search engine. The CTSA-IP Portal, which is currently a pilot test site, lists all licensable technologies for 11 CTSAs and the NIH intramural programs. This site allows for bundling of CTSA IP and can be searched by key word and disease area.
- The Community Engagement KFC published Best Practices in Community Engagement, a report summarizing the CTSA consortium's series of regional and national workshops and conferences on community engagement from 2007 through 2008.
- The Community Engagement KFC also has a paper in press titled Clinical Translational Science Awards and Community Engagement: Now is the Time to Mainstream Prevention into the Nation's Health Research Agenda. The paper will be published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.
- A recent paper Synergies and Distinctions Between Computational Disciplines in Biomedical Research by a number of members of the CTSA consortium was published in the July 2009 issue of Academic Medicine on behalf of the CTSA Biomedical Informatics KFC. The paper describes the complementary but distinct roles of operational information technology (IT), research IT, computer science, and biomedical informatics. It also offers recommendations for administrative structures that can help maximize the benefits of computation to biomedical research within academic health centers.
- The Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Research Design KFC expanded CTSpedia, an online collection of best practices, tools, educational materials, and other items about biostatistics, ethics, and research design. Created by the University of California, San Francisco, CTSpedia also features an Ask the Experts forum and provides links to statistical tools.
- To facilitate resource sharing and networking among CTSA consortium members, the Communications KFC is developing an online ShareCenter. Made possible through an NCRR Administrative Supplement, ShareCenter draws on the utility and popularity of social networking websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The user-friendly ShareCenter offers a web-based forum to submit requests, begin discussions about resource needs or projects in development, and provide feedback.