UW News

November 12, 2009

UW, Group Health and others create Researchtoolkit.org

Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering

Scientists and staff at the UW sometimes tap into core services to be more efficient and capitalize on resources. At the UW Medicine South Lake Union campus, for instance, researchers use shared equipment to analyze specimens. It saves money and space and encourages collaboration.


Now, researchers across the country have an additional online resource, Researchtoolkit.org, aimed at putting best practices and tools in one place for clinical and translational science. Dr. Laura-Mae Baldwin, UW professor of family medicine, said the idea stemmed from the University’s Institute for Translational Health Sciences and colleagues at Group Health Research Institute.


Right around the time the idea was hatched here, Baldwin said, an investigator at Duke University had a similar proposal. So committee members reviewing grant proposals at the National Institutes of Health saw the potential for collaboration. Wayne State University also was part of the team.


Group Health’s Greene, lead investigator and a research associate, said the Web site was adapted from work she had conducted for the HMO Research Network, which connects researchers and has information on how to develop a grant, standardize recruitment and data collection, and translate results into practice.


Baldwin said her role as part of the team relates to development of a research network in the WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho) states. Greene said she and colleagues at Group Health collected data, conducted a needs assessment and looked at existing tools to see what components should exist on the Researchtoolkit.org site.


“One of the things that is neat about this project is the idea to leverage existing tools, so that investigators can use them for multi-site research,” said Baldwin. Multi-site research could mean scientists in one state could better coordinate with researchers on the other side of the country. But Baldwin said it could be used for research within the same city, too.


“The toolkit could be used any time you’re going to work across different sites, even primary care clinics in one city,” she said. “Each site might have its own patient population and culture. The sites may have different ways of billing or relating to an academic environment, so in all the examples, you need to take sites or communities that do things differently and bring them together under the auspices of a single project.”


Having the resources reside on a single site is an efficiency measure itself, too. “There’s no need for researchers and project teams to start from scratch,” Baldwin said.


Greene and Baldwin said they’ll be watching closely to see how researchers use the site, including which links are the most popular for visitors. They also hope to glean some “lessons learned” about the best ways to promote the site, too.


“We view ourselves almost as a gateway to excellent tools that a lot of others have put hours and sweat equity into,” said Greene. “The site gives a nod to the individuality inherent in research but also acknowledges that researchers don’t need to start with a blank page, and can save some steps and some time.”

Visit the site here to learn more about the project and explore how you might use it in your work.