The National Institutes of Health is piloting a cross-country network for primary care research to improve community-based primary care and increase the presence of underserved populations in clinical research, the agency announced Thursday.
As part of the Communities Advancing Research Equity for Health initiative, also known as CARE for Health, NIH-funded clinical research networks and primary care sites will partner to conduct studies and research on health issues affecting local patient populations. NIH will award $30 million in fiscal 2024 and 2025 for the pilot, with initial funding going to organizations that serve rural communities.
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CARE for Health is intended to improve patient outcomes by increasing participation in clinical trials and expanding communities’ access to scientific research, said NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli in a news release.
“We must adapt our research to be more inclusive and more responsive to the needs of communities currently underserved in health research,” Bertangnolli said. “Our vision for CARE for Health is to help primary care providers and their patients contribute to knowledge generation, and to deliver evidence back to them to achieve better care.”
The program aims to engage patients from various racial and ethnic groups, socioeconomic backgrounds and age ranges in local research efforts. Findings will be shared with participating providers to inform their clinical practice and tackle common health issues.
The CARE for Health program should lead to less need for primary care providers to conduct their own research and more training opportunities to build on new clinical knowledge, according to NIH.
NIH recently came under fire for missing gender and racial diversity enrollment goals in its clinical research.
A study published May 29 by the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Inspector General found that NIH-funded clinical trials often failed to meet the agency’s enrollment targets for Black, Native American and Alaska Native and Asian participants. Around 50% of the agency’s clinical trials did not have clearly explained goals for enrolling representative patient populations or a breakdown of targeted participant demographics by race, ethnicity and gender.
“These shortfalls we saw in our review of inclusion plans raise concerns about NIH’s peer review process and the extent to which this section of the grant application is thoroughly analyzed,” the OIG said in the study.
