The coordinated clinical studies network: a multidisciplinary alliance to facilitate research and improve care

The NIH Roadmap is a major effort to reshape the US health research enterprise to accelerate medical discovery and to do so in such a way that actually hastens population health improvement through research. The Roadmap's ultimate goal resonates with the HMO Research Network, a consortium of integrated health care systems that uses its collective scientific capabilities to integrate research, practice, and policy for the improvement of health and health care among diverse populations. (See page 6 for abstracts from the HMO Research Network annual conference.) As such, the HMO Research Network was ideally suited to propose a new consortium project as a part of the NIH Roadmap, the Coordinated Clinical Studies Network (CCSN). The CCSN was funded in 2004 to create a path-breaking research facility that leverages several distinctive features of the HMO Research Network: the multidisciplinary scientific capabilities of its researchers; the ability to rapidly move clinical research findings into care delivery; its large, diverse patient populations; and a commitment to placing its findings in the public domain. Among the goals of the CCSN are to augment the capacity and infrastructure for conducting research, and to use considerable investments in health informatics to improve the scope and efficiency of research data collection. The NIH Roadmap is a revolutionary step toward a new paradigm for research and responds to both a compelling social need and rapid technological advances in biomedicine. The CCSN's participation in the Roadmap Initiative is a unique opportunity for researchers, clinicians, and our patients.