The Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative encourages collaboration across partner institutions and community organizations. We offer support to enhance multisite research efficiency and leverage shared resources via three offerings: Multisite Research Consultations, Resource Utilization Studios, and our Best Practices Toolkit.
- Multisite Research Consultation: A comprehensive research planning consultation for investigators interested in or actively conducting multisite research.
- Resource Utilization Studios: Customized to our investigator needs, RUS brings together an expert panel to help problem solve, plan, and promote shared resources across the CTSC.
- Best Practices Toolkit: Learn how to best navigate CTSC partner institutions for a streamlined multisite research experience.
The CTSC of Northern Ohio aims to promote city and state-wide collaborations across health systems. Multi-site research consultations help researchers coordinate study startup by providing gap analysis and project management support, enhancing efficiency in multi-center planning and execution.
These comprehensive research planning consultations are for investigators interested in or actively conducting multisite research. Consultations are available for investigators across all stages of study conduct, from pre-award through study close-out.
Multisite consultants are available to assist with streamlining study startup and to support study conduct in multisite projects. Topics that can be addressed during multisite research consultations include:
- Conducting a needs assessment
- Finding a collaborator at a partner institution
- Assessing site feasibility
- Identifying IT limitations across multiple sites
- Incorporating decentralized clinical trial components, including remote consent, electronic patient-reported outcomes, wearable devices, telehealth, etc.
- Navigating the reliant IRB review process
- Ensuring regulatory oversight at external sites
- Recruiting diverse research participants across institutions
- Developing a team charter and work plan
Resource Utilization Studios are dynamic, customized roundtables of expert investigators and administrators who come together to help individual PIs problem solve, plan, and leverage CTSC-wide resources.
- Studios are facilitated, virtual sessions that last 1.5 - 2 hours
- To begin the studio, PIs present their research and the current research problem they would like to address
- Group discussion, problem solving, and real-time organized feedback is compiled
- PI received all expert feedback, recommendations, next steps, and resources following the studio in a post-studio report
Studio topics vary by investigator need, however, below are topic examples that may benefit your research:
- Hypothesis generation
- Study design
- Grant proposal development
- Method development/optimization
- Rare disease patient outreach
- Recruitment
- Data analysis
To request a studio session, follow the link below.
Multi-institutional Toolkits & Best Practices
The Multi-institutional Toolkits & Best Practices provides a harmonized menu of specialized tools and best practices to implement and/or execute investigator-initiated clinical and translational research study at more than one site across the CTSC partner institutions of Northern Ohio (i.e. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic, MetroHealth Medical Center, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, and the University of Toledo and Northeast Ohio Medical University).
Resources Available for Pre-implementation and Implementation (by CTSC Site)
Each of the Cleveland CTSC sites have similar resources available to support your clinical research. Please speak with representatives at each site to include fees in site-specific budgets for applicable support services.
To request services across the CTSC, use SPARCRequest.
Site-specific resources can be found on individual Clinical Research Unit websites:
Site-specific Research Roadmaps and Contacts
Starting up a study across multiple, diverse sites can be daunting for even the most experienced researcher.
The Cleveland Clinic, MetroHealth and University Hospitals collaborate through the CTSC Hub Research Capacity (HRC) core to support rapid study start-up across more than one CTSC site. It doesn’t eliminate the steps at each site, but your institution’s HRC representatives will help you and your site PIs navigate and access the resources you need. The sites have agreed on similar start-up steps and provide contacts.
Please see the downloadable spreadsheets with institution-specific contacts for study start-up:
REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a secure web platform used to build and manage online surveys and projects. It may be used to collect almost any type of data, but is intended to support online or offline data capture for research studies and operations. At your institution, REDCap is managed as a HIPAA-compliant platform.
As an employee of your institution, you have free, unlimited access to REDCap as a benefit of the CTSC. This easy-to-use database allows you to create customized complex data-capture projects, associated surveys and data queries, and record dashboards.
At each CTSC site, through the Clinical Research Unit, you have access to free REDCap consultation services to help you build and refine your projects. Once created, you can share your project’s data dictionary with your multisite research partners to create clinical research electronic case report forms to standardize and enhance data quality and regulatory compliance.
Each CTSC site has also enabled REDCap’s research E-consent module.
Check your institutions policies and procedures for more information on access and data sharing.
If you are requesting services from more than one site, you may want to begin by placing your request through SPARCRequest, the CTSC’s service catalog. Submitting a service request initiates a consult with a site’s services. But you should be prepared to submit additional information to each site through site-specific request forms.
CTSC Regulatory Roadmap and Toolkits
The resources below provide tools necessary to overcome regulatory (e.g. Data Use Agreements, IRB, etc.) obstacles encountered by investigators that want to execute multi-institutional clinical and translational studies within the CTSC network.
- Regulatory Roadmap and Timeline for Multisite Studies
- Reliant Review Tip-sheet and Guidance
- Study Start-up Checklist
Research Enhancements in Accrual Plan (REAP)
REAP is a strategic development plan for recruitment of historically minoritized groups in clinical trials with the goal of improving generalizability of the evidence and patient outcomes in Northeast Ohio. This plan can be used during the study design phase or during study start-up/enrollment. REAP also promotes diversity in investigators, research team members, and research topics to increase representation by providing support via the Voucher Program.
Trial Innovation Toolbox
Trial Innovation Network (TIN) provides free resources to the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) research community. These resources are intended to provide a variety of information that includes the best evidence-based recruitment information and some that may be evidence-informed. Visit the TIN Toolbox.