Collaborative Initiatives and Networks (CoIN)

The mission of CoIN is to promote collaborative work with other groups across campus. To that end, GIM CoIN encompasses several initiatives:

Delivery Redesign for Innovation, Value, and Equity (DRIVE)

The mission of DRIVE is to accelerate innovation, value, and equity through safety-net delivery redesign that is grounded in evaluation, implementation, and education. It is a key collaboration with our partners at Parkland Health.

Key aspects of evaluation and implementation can support safety-net delivery redesign. These include:

• Retrospective analysis, which can drive insight to inform future redesign efforts
• Prospective implementation, which can drive insight about redesign effectiveness
• Design methods, which can drive insight about redesign success or failure.

Clinical Research, Evaluation, and Data Office (CREDO)

The mission of CREDO is to serve as an institutional resource at UT Southwestern that supports scholars in leveraging data resources into impactful clinical research.

The Office’s goals are to:

• Curate and build a data asset collection for use by clinical researchers,
• Develop support data resources to support data use,
• Serve as unified hub for information and resources related to research and evaluation

The motivation for CREDO is that multiple data types enable impactful clinical research. These include electronic health record (EHR), claims, population sample, program or organization, and area-level datasets – all of which have potential for different research uses, such as observational analyses, clinical trials (recruitment, safety surveillance), and preliminary data estimates or analyses.

However, available data ≠ usable data. Use also requires other processes, including mapping, management, standardization, detailing, and curation. These are difficult processes to achieve or maintain at the level of individual scholar or scholarly unit. Instead, the opportunity and need exists at the institutional level in units such as CREDO.

The CREDO team includes faculty leads (MD/DO, PhD) along with data and operational staff. The team works closely with data science and methods experts across campus.

Health Systems Evaluation and Action Team (HEAT)

The mission of the UT Southwestern Health Systems Evaluation and Action Team (HEAT) is to support and collaborate with people and groups to design, evaluate, and implement care delivery innovations across the health system. This perspective of translational scholarship and application would align with the institutional clinical and researcher missions, acknowledging health systems work that can be done in pursuit of complementary yet distinct goals: to produce generalizable insight and to produce more actionable change.

The nexus between operations and research represents opportunities for health system innovation: one in which science is used to address health care delivery in order to integrate local with external evidence and put knowledge into practice. These emphases are consistent with the goals and practices of learning health systems.

The structure and work conducted through HEAT aligns with Learning Health System (LHS) competencies and capacities. Guided by an LHS framework, science can be used to address care delivery in several ways.

1. Observational methods can be used to identify and characterize the need for targeted interventions and glean insights about prior or existing initiatives.
2. Interventions can be prospectively tested for effectiveness.
3. User-centered design can be used to create or modify interventions to increase stakeholder engagement and uptake.

Together, these methods can inform decisions to scale, maintain, adapt, or discontinue care delivery processes or programs. They also represent a way to integrate local experience with external evidence and put knowledge into practice.

Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design (BERD)

One of the missions in the UT Southwestern Clinical and Translational Science Award is to support and collaborate with scholars on methods used in translational research and science, spanning from study design to data management, analytic methods, and results interpretation.

The Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design (BERD) team helps fulfill this mission. In particular, it collaborates with and complements other groups across campus to provide investigators with research methods and analytic support. The BERD is designed to work with scholars and teams throughout the life cycle of study development and execution. Examples of work in these domains:

• Defining hypotheses and endpoints
• Developing study protocols
• Assisting with grant applications
• Calculating sample sizes
• Setting up study databases
• Converting raw data into analytic sets
• Conducting analysis & preparing reports
• Interpreting results
• Assisting with dissemination products

Overall, the goal of BERD is to cultivate a collaborative environment and establish relationships that will lead to successful funding, research, and dissemination.

BERD does so by having requesters complete the Research Design & Methods Intake Form, which is reviewed and processed by the team. In general, for appropriate requests, BERD provide 3-5 hours of consultation and services free-of-charge in anticipation that in most cases, this amount of time will enable us to either address requesters’ needs or identify that a longer engagement – and associated funding – would be needed to do so.

BERD faculty include experts in biostatistics, epidemiology, data science, machine learning, pragmatic trials, observational analyses, heath services research, community-engaged research, implementation science, health policy, and behavioral economics, among other topics.