Twenty-four groups from across Arkansas were honored Dec. 4 at the 2nd Annual Community Partners Celebration for their work in support of research at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).

Sponsored by the UAMS Translational Research Institute, the annual celebration dinner included a welcome from Chancellor Dan Rahn, M.D., and remarks by Karen Yeary, Ph.D., a researcher in the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health, and the Rev. Jerome Turner, director of special projects for the Boys, Girls, Adults Development Center in Marvell, and pastor of the Mt. Everett and New Hope Baptist Churches in rural Phillips County.

“Our search for solutions to improve Arkansas’ health status isn’t confined to a laboratory on our campus,” Rahn said. “We have about 50 researchers conducting community-based research, and their success depends on a highly collaborative relationship with communities across the state.”

The Translational Research Institute’s mission includes helping UAMS researchers establish and sustain community partnerships that will help UAMS better address the state’s many health issues, particularly where health disparities exist in communities at high risk for poor health outcomes.

Of the nearly 100 community partners attending the Dec. 4 event were members of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Community Advisory Board are (l-r): Melva Trask, Mary Olson, Tiffany Haynes, Ph.D., and Edlund Marshall.Of the nearly 100 community partners attending the Dec. 4 event were members of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Community Advisory Board are (l-r): Melva Trask, Mary Olson, Tiffany Haynes, Ph.D., and Edlund Marshall.
For example, the institute has supported UAMS research partnerships with the Tri County Rural Health Network based in Helena to study the role of “community connectors” who help connect the elderly and disabled to health services in the Delta. College of Public Health researchers found that $2.6 million in Medicaid savings could be achieved by keeping older adults out of long-term care facilities by connecting them with home health care services. That study has been expanded to 15 counties with support from the National Institutes of Health.

Laura James, M.D., director of the Translational Research Institute, noted that because the burden of poor health is not evenly distributed across the state, UAMS must work closely with communities to design new ways of addressing entrenched health issues such as chronic diseases related to poor lifestyle choices.

“Our community partners are a driving force behind our research, even guiding the research questions that we pursue,” James said. “UAMS is among the leaders of this relatively new approach to research, and we are grateful to have such involved communities.”

Another example of UAMS-community partnership is that of Yeary and Turner, who created the Faith Task Force, a coalition of pastors from African-American churches in the Delta, local government officials, community-based organizations, and UAMS to address obesity and other health issues that lead to chronic diseases. Established nearly 10 years ago, the Faith Task Force is collaborating on a study that involves 450 participants from the Arkansas Delta to address obesity, and the study of a depression intervention that will enroll 72 participants across two counties.

The Rev. Jerome Turner and Karen Yeary, Ph.D., a UAMS researcher, gave the keynote address at the UAMS Translational Research Institute Community Partner Celebration. The Rev. Jerome Turner and Karen Yeary, Ph.D., a UAMS researcher, gave the keynote address at the UAMS Translational Research Institute Community Partner Celebration.
“The Faith Task Force has been an equal partner in all aspects of the research, including issue identification, study design, intervention development, evaluation development, intervention implementation, and dissemination of research results,” Yeary said.

The groups honored Thursday were:

Community Organizations

Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese
Arkansas Disability Coalition/Arkansas Family-2-Family Health Information Center
Arkansas Epilepsy Association
Boys, Girls, Adults Community Development Center
CARE Coalition
East Arkansas Enterprise Community Inc.
Feed Communities
Gaps in Services to the Marshallese Taskforce
Greater Macedonia Baptist Church
Holman Community Development Center
Mid Delta Community Consortium
Mississippi County Economic Opportunity Commission Inc.
Neighbors that Love
Promise Neighborhood Advisory Board
Tri County Rural Health Network

Representatives of the Translational Research Institute attending the event included (l-r), Cornelia Beck, Ph.D., R.N., associate director, Camille Hart, program manager of the Community Engagement Program, and Kate Stewart, M.D., director of the Community Engagement Program.Representatives of the Translational Research Institute attending the event included (l-r), Cornelia Beck, Ph.D., R.N., associate director, Camille Hart, program manager of the Community Engagement Program, and Kate Stewart, M.D., director of the Community Engagement Program.
Community Advisory Boards (CABs)

12th Street Health and Wellness Center CAB
Arkansas Center for Health Disparities Community Engagement Core CAB
Community Advisory Committee to the Texarkana Regional Center on Aging
Cord Blood Bank of Arkansas Advisory Board
Faith Task Force
Jefferson County Faith Task Force
Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) CAB
Prevention Research Center CAB
Translational Research Institute CAB
The UAMS Translational Research Institute’s mission is to help accelerate research that will improve the health and health care of people in Arkansas and across the country. TRI is one of 62 recipients of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA).

Special needs children with medical complexity, who see multiple specialists for more than one chronic condition, are more likely to have a health care need go unmet, according to a paper by Dennis Kuo, M.D., an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and the Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI), published this month in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs.

“Among the children with medical complexity, unmet need was not associated with primary language, income level, or having Medicaid,” wrote Kuo and second author Anthony Goudie, Ph.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics at UAMS. “We concluded that medical complexity itself can be a primary determinant of unmet needs.”

Kuo’s and Goudie’s research has been supported by the UAMS Translational Research Institute as a KL2 Mentored Career Development Award recipients, which provided each with two years of salary support, research funding and training.

The paper, entitled Inequities in Health Care Needs for Children with Medical Complexity, was presented Monday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. It appears in Health Affairs’ December issue focusing on children’s health.

Based on a secondary analysis of data from the 2005–06 and 2009–10 National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs, the inequities the paper examined were those based on race or ethnicity, primary language in the household, insurance type and poverty status. The paper compares inequities of children with special needs to those of children with special needs who also have medical complexity. The results indicate children with medical complexity are more than twice as likely to have at least one unmet need compared to children with special needs without medical complexity.

An abstract of the paper can be viewed online. Copies of the entire study are available to members of the media upon request.

Kuo is also a co-author of the paper Children with Medical Complexity and Medicaid: Spending and Cost Savings, which was also accepted by Health Affairs and is also being presented at the National Press Club. Its primary author is Jay Berry, M.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Kuo is the second TRI KL2 graduate to be invited to speak at the National Press Club by Health Affairs. In 2011, Holly Felix, Ph.D., M.P.A., presented her findings at the Washington, D.C., venue that community health workers could achieve significant Medicaid savings by connecting the elderly and disabled adults in the Delta to community-based health services, enabling them to remain in their homes rather than moving to long-term care institutions. The NIH is funding an expansion of her earlier study, which was conducted in three counties calculated savings of $2.6 million over three years in those counties.

In August, the Translational Research Institute (TRI) at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) joined a national collaborative effort which will help the TRI assess and better understand to the health needs of individuals living in Central Arkansas, as well as their interest in taking part in research.

The TRI is one of seven institutions nationally taking part in the collaboration, known as the Sentinel Network for Community-Based Participatory Research. The goal is to determine attitudes in the community about research, any past experiences with research studies, and what would motivate community members to participate in a research study. In an effort to collect this information, the TRI is using the Sentinel Network Survey.

The Sentinel Network Survey has been utilized by six other universities around the country. These institutions collaborated to establish a sustainable network that encourages ongoing, real-time assessments of top health and community needs, concerns and research participation.

The project is being implemented under the TRI’s Community Engagement Component, which is directed by Kate Stewart, M.D., M.P.H., who also leads the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health’s Office of Community-Based Participatory Research. The goal is to collect at least 1,000 surveys by the end of the fall semester. Students at the College of Public Health were invited to administer the survey at sites in Little Rock.

Before being deployed to their sites, the student volunteers participated in a four-hour training preparing them for their role. The training included the history and context of the community in which they would be serving, interviewing basics and cultural awareness. As part of their training, students also complete UAMS’ HIPAA training, as well as the human subjects protection training that is required of researchers and research staff at UAMS and other academic institutions.

In September, 14 student volunteers began administering the survey. Each week, they go in pairs to predetermined sites in the community, where they use the one-page survey to collect data from community members; it takes less than five minutes to complete. No personal information is being collected from anyone completing the survey, so their responses are anonymous.

MPH student Sharice Loftin says the experience has built her confidence and skills, especially “how to approach people to get them to fill out the data, because how you approach them really plays a role in whether they are going to do it or not.”

More than that, the connection with people out in the community has made public health and what she is learning in the classroom much more meaningful.

“I really, really love this program, because a lot of time you see what the need is in the community, but when you actually get that dialogue between community members and learn the history of the community itself, I feel like that approach to learning is very beneficial and really hits home more versus just reading it in black and white,” Loftin said.

Data collection is taking place in and around the 12th Street Corridor in Little Rock. Among the sites participating in the program are Harmony Health Clinic, Shepherd’s Hope Neighborhood Health Center, the UAMS 12th Street Health and Wellness Center, and the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library & Learning Center. In addition to weekly volunteer opportunities, students will administer surveys at local community fairs and events.

The plan for future semesters is to involve student volunteers from the other colleges at UAMS and to have the activity qualify as a project of the Inter-professional Education Program.

For more information about the Sentinel Network, contact Program Coordinator Nicki Spencer at 501-526-6629 or via email at ndspencder@uams.edu.

This story was adapted from a version that first appeared in COPH News, a publication of the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health.

The Translational Research Institute (TRI) has established a mechanism that will help UAMS investigators obtain the credentials necessary to use Veterans Health Administration (VHA) data repositories in their research. The VHA is the United States’ largest integrated health care system with more than 1,700 sites of care, serving 8.76 million veterans each year. This integrated health network allows investigators to explore a wide range of research questions. TRI is providing funding for administrative and programmer support to assist with credentialing and preliminary technical support. To learn more, contact TRIservices@uams.edu.

The Translational Research Institute (TRI) will expand clinical research training with support from a $75,000 supplemental award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).

TRI will use the funding over the next six months to support the clinical research specialist program and expand curriculum and online training opportunities. A primary goal of NCATS is to ensure that all study personnel are equipped with the necessary and fundamental competencies to execute the highest quality clinical studies. The NCATS award is also expected to help streamline and standardize training in Good Clinical Practice across the 62 Clinical and Translational Sciences Award (CTSA) consortium sites.

This list of funding opportunities was updated Oct. 10 and includes a tab with archived funding opportunities that remain open.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Translational Research Institute (TRI) and the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (UAF) have awarded $20,000 for a telehealth pilot research project led by Sarah Rhoads Kinder, Ph.D., D.N.P., an assistant professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Her project is titled, “Postpartum Management of the Pregnancy Complicated by Preeclampsia: A Pilot Study Using Health Monitoring at Home.” The one-year award includes an additional $5,000 from UAF because Kinder is collaborating with Christina Serrano, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems. The pilot was chosen from three telehealth pilot applications.

Research protocols submitted through CLARA are no longer receiving an automatic content review prior to the protocols’ arrival at the UAMS Institutional Review Board (IRB) office. On Oct. 13, the UAMS Translational Research Services Center (TRSC) began routing all submissions not requiring budget/coverage analysis directly to the IRB, where they will receive their first content review. The practice traditionally has involved an automatic pre-IRB review by the Research Support Center (now part of the TRSC). To avoid redundancy due to the IRB office having its own pre-IRB review process, this TRSC service is now being provided only at the request of researchers. Investigators who would like assistance with protocol development and IRB submission may request services at TRIservices@uams.edu.

Jiang Bian, Ph.D., found that TRI has had a positive impact on research at UAMS.

A recent analysis found that TRI has played an important and effective role in promoting collaborative research at UAMS.

Led by Jiang Bian, Ph.D., the social network analysis looked at researcher collaborations based on grant data from 2006 to 2012. UAMS received its Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) in 2009.

Bian’s work has led to new informatics tools for measuring the efficiency of UAMS’ research environment, whether it is improving, and whether external factors are playing a role. The analysis was published in the February 2014 Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

“We found that the CTSA and the establishment of TRI has had a positive impact,” said Bian, a researcher in the Department of Biomedical Informatics whose analysis was supported by TRI. “Prior to the TRI, there were far fewer collaborations and smaller, more isolated groups of researchers.”

Prediction Model
An intriguing element to his work is a statistical model showing which researchers should collaborate. The model was developed using 80 percent of the researcher population and then verified by applying it to the other 20 percent.

“Being able to predict is pretty exciting,” Bian said. “It helps people understand what sort of collaboration environment we have and whether the things we’re doing are enriching the environment for collaboration.”

Bian said TRI will reach out to researchers who are not collaborating but who should be based on the prediction model. “We’ll share our results with them so that they’re aware of the opportunity.”

In addition, Bian is developing visual analytics for TRI. The visualization tool, based on collaborations found in grant data, is designed to help any audience understand the nature of research networks and how they may evolve over time. The tool can track individual UAMS researchers as well as groups of researchers over time.

View Bian’s poster presentation: Interactive visualization for understanding and analyzing biomedical research collaboration networks.

The Translational Research Institute (TRI) has awarded six UAMS researchers approximately $50,000 each for pilot studies. The annual awards are made to those studies with the strongest likelihood of leading to improved health and health care. The researchers and their project titles are:

Paul Gottschall, Ph.D., College of Medicine (COM), Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology: Targeting lecticans to enhance synaptic plasticity in Alzheimer’s disease
Gur Kaushal, Ph.D., COM, Department of Internal Medicine: Antifibrotic therapy by upregulation of autophagy to reverse renal fibrosis in chronic kidney disease
Dennis Kuo, M.D., COM, Department of Pediatrics: Barriers and facilitators to health care transition from pediatric to adult health care
Lee Ann MacMillan-Crow, Ph.D., COM, Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology: Novel therapy to reduce injury to human donor kidneys prior to transplant
Mark Mennemeier, Ph.D., COM, Department of Neurobiology & Developmental Sciences: A joint CTSA (Clinical and Translational Science Award) project with WUSM (Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis) leading to a phase II clinical trial for tinnitus
Steven Post, Ph.D., COM, Department of Pathology: Pathological features that predict clinical outcome in vulvar squamous cell carcinoma patients
TRI utilizes National Institutes of Health (NIH) Study Section review criteria in making its selections. Reviewers are not involved in the review and scoring of applications where potential conflicts of interest exist.