What is the Clinical Research Program?The Clinical Research Program (CRP) is Massachusetts General Hospital’s infrastructure for clinical investigators. It provides direct services to investigators for all types of clinical research: translational, trials and outcomes. The CRP also develops innovative tools to anticipate and enable future opportunities, such as:
- Clinical Support Services assists investigators with study design, biostatistical consultation, funding sources, budgets, survey design and validation, recruitment and study coordination
- Educational Programming provides basic and continuing education and support for clinical investigators, clinical research coordinators, research nurses and study staff
- Informatics tools can help identify potential subjects, navigate the system and find relevant information via “one-stop shopping"
- Omics Consultation provides consultation and triage for the MGH clinical research community. Assistance is provided in genetic study design and execution, human subject protection, career advice, and/or identification of particular resources. A new emphasis of the unit focuses on emerging technologies for metabolomic and proteomic profiling of human samples, with a goal of optimizing sample throughput, cost, and breadth of analytical coverage. Requests are triaged by the Omics Unit and assigned to specific consultants depending on expertise and availability.
- Clinical Effectiveness Consultation supports hypothesis-driven research including operational evaluation that improves patient outcomes through systemic changes in system, provider and patient behaviors while fostering careers of junior faculty.
- Patient Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) provides educational programming, proposal preparation consultations, outcome measure support, and stakeholder engagement assistance to help investigators who are navigating the waters of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute and PCOR research.
- The CRP’s Electronic Health Record Research (EHR) consultations provides support for investigators who are considering studies making use of electronic health records data. Assistance is available for study design, research proposal preparation and generation of preliminary data to support such proposals, linkage with other clinical datasets, and identification of potential co-investigators and collaborators.
- Imaging Biomarkers Consultation helps investigators identify questions in their research that can be answered using imaging technologies and then access personnel and technologic resources within MGH and the Partners HealthCare System.