March 20, 2024
MEDIA ADVISORY
Contact: Kelsey Butz
Email: butzk@ochin.org
Phone: (518) 256-7540
PORTLAND, Ore. (March 20, 2024) — New funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is supporting the expansion of the OCHIN-led ADVANCE Clinical Research Network. The expansion will deepen ADVANCE’s existing partnership with the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) by welcoming their hospital system to the network, as well as welcome the addition of the University of Washington (UW) as a partner. The $500,000 award will build upon ADVANCE’s decade-long success and expand national representation from the Pacific Northwest by bringing an estimated 3.9 million new patients into the ADVANCE Data Warehouse—already the nation’s largest data warehouse dedicated to the study of health care and outcomes for systemically underserved patients.
“ADVANCE is working to improve health equity by ensuring that the health outcomes and experiences of low-income, uninsured, and underserved patients who receive care in federally qualified health centers are included in research,” said Erika Cottrell, PhD, MPP, principal investigator of ADVANCE, director of social policy research at OCHIN, and associate professor at OHSU. “After a decade building this strong foundation for representative research, we’re excited for our expanded partnership with OHSU and the new collaboration with UW, and we can't wait to see what we accomplish together next.”
ADVANCE, or Accelerating Data Value Across a National Community Health Center Network, was established in 2014 with funding from PCORI to serve as one of nine networks in PCORnet, a national “network of networks” designed to improve patient outcomes through research. Over the past decade, ADVANCE has built the nation’s largest and most comprehensive database on health care and outcomes for communities and populations historically underrepresented or excluded from research.
The ADVANCE data warehouse includes research-ready electronic health record data on health care and outcomes for over 11 million patients, as well as linked area-level data on the communities and neighborhoods where patients live. To date, ADVANCE has supported over 30 research studies and 80 peer-reviewed publications. In addition, ADVANCE supports an active patient engagement panel (PEP) to foster patient and community engagement in research.
The new PCORI funding will build on the framework that ADVANCE has established and further enhance its national footprint by:
- Increasing regional representation of the Pacific Northwest in the ADVANCE network
- Adding hospital-based clinical data to the data warehouse for the first time, enabling more complete longitudinal data for ADVANCE patients (both inpatient and outpatient)
- Integrating additional sources of data to inform new research, including genomics, tissue, and biospecimens
- Bringing additional expertise in clinical trials to the ADVANCE team
“We are excited at the Oregon Health and Science University and OHSU’s Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute to be part of the ADVANCE network,” said Mohammad Adibuzzaman, PhD, director of the Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute (OCTRI) and an assistant professor at OHSU. “This will allow researchers across the country to recruit more diverse populations for research projects and do comparative effectiveness studies across disparate populations more efficiently. In particular, the large network of federally qualified health centers with OCHIN and a large patient population at OHSU will create this unique network in the Pacific Northwest region. The network will contribute to the translational research mission of OHSU and OCTRI by addressing the significant barrier of disparity in clinical research for the underserved population.”
“My University of Washington School of Medicine team, including faculty and staff in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, are excited to collaborate with OCHIN to increase the efficiency of health care research that serves the needs of our large, diverse population in the Pacific Northwest,” said Graham Nichol, MD, professor of medicine and emergency medicine at UW Medicine.
The 11 million patients represented by ADVANCE are served by 2,414 OCHIN member health clinics in 39 states and additional clinics served by other ADVANCE partners, including Fenway Health and Health Choice Network. It is overseen by Cottrell and dual-principal investigator John Heintzman, MD, associate professor at OHSU. Watch the video below to learn more about the history of ADVANCE.
About ADVANCE
ADVANCE is a Clinical Research Network in PCORnet® which has been developed with funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute® (PCORI®).
