There is growing evidence for both the need to manage work–life conflict and the opportunity for mentors to advise their mentees on how to do this in an academic research environment.

A multiphase approach was used to develop and implement an evidence-informed training module to help mentors guide their mentees in issues of work–life conflict. Analysis of existing data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a mentor training curriculum (n = 283 mentor/mentee dyads) informed the development of a work–life mentoring module which was incorporated into an established research mentor training curriculum and evaluated by faculty at a single academic medical center.

Only 39% of mentors and 36% of mentees in the RCT indicated high satisfaction with the balance between their personal and professional lives. The majority (75%) of mentors and mentees were sharing personal information as part of the mentoring relationship which was significantly associated with mentees’ ratings of the balance between their personal and professional lives. The effectiveness of the work–life module was assessed by 60 faculty mentors participating in a mentor training program at an academic medical center from 2013 to 2017. Among the respondents to the post-training survey, 82.5% indicated they were very/somewhat comfortable addressing work–life issues with their mentees as a result of the training, with significant improvements (p = 0.001) in self-assessments of mentoring skill in this domain.

Our findings indicate that a structured training approach can significantly improve mentors’ self-reported skills in addressing work–life issues with their mentees.

Justice system-involved women with opioid use disorder (OUD) experience layered health risks and stigma, yet peer navigation services during reentry may support positive outcomes. This manuscript offers a program description of a women’s peer navigation intervention delivered pre- and post-release from jail to remove barriers to women’s access to OUD treatment, including medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD).

All data were collected as part of a NIH/NIDA-funded national cooperative, the Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN) project. Through the larger study’s intervention, women in jail with OUD are connected via videoconference to a peer navigator, who provides an initial reentry recovery assessment and 12+ weeks of recovery support sessions post-release. Qualitative analyses examined peers’ notes from initial sessions with women (N = 50) and in-depth interviews with peers (N = 3).

Peers’ notes from initial sessions suggest that women anticipate challenges to successful recovery and community reentry. More than half of women (51.9%) chose OUD treatment as their primary goal, while others selected more basic needs (e.g. housing, transportation). In qualitative interviews, peers described women’s transitions to the community as unpredictable, creating difficulties for reentry planning, particularly for rural women. Peers also described challenges with stigma against MOUD and establishing relationships via telehealth, but ultimately believed their role was valuable in providing resource referrals, support, and hope for recovery.

For women with OUD, peer navigation can offer critical linkages to services at release from jail, in addition to hope, encouragement, and solidarity. Findings provide important insights for future peer-based interventions.

Many clinical trials leverage real-world data. Typically, these data are manually abstracted from electronic health records (EHRs) and entered into electronic case report forms (CRFs), a time and labor-intensive process that is also error-prone and may miss information. Automated transfer of data from EHRs to eCRFs has the potential to reduce data abstraction and entry burden as well as improve data quality and safety.

We conducted a test of automated EHR-to-CRF data transfer for 40 participants in a clinical trial of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. We determined which coordinator-entered data could be automated from the EHR (coverage), and the frequency with which the values from the automated EHR feed and values entered by study personnel for the actual study matched exactly (concordance).

The automated EHR feed populated 10,081/11,952 (84%) coordinator-completed values. For fields where both the automation and study personnel provided data, the values matched exactly 89% of the time. Highest concordance was for daily lab results (94%), which also required the most personnel resources (30 minutes per participant). In a detailed analysis of 196 instances where personnel and automation entered values differed, both a study coordinator and a data analyst agreed that 152 (78%) instances were a result of data entry error.

An automated EHR feed has the potential to significantly decrease study personnel effort while improving the accuracy of CRF data.

News media play an important role in raising public awareness, framing public opinions, affecting policy formulation, and acknowledgment of public health issues. Traditional qualitative content analysis for news sentiments and focuses are time-consuming and may not efficiently convey sentiments nor the focuses of news media.

We used descriptive statistics and state-of-art text mining to conduct sentiment analysis and topic modeling, to efficiently analyze over 3 million Reuters news articles during 2007–2017 for identifying their coverage, sentiments, and focuses for public health issues. Based on the top keywords from public health scientific journals, we identified 10 major public health issues (i.e., “air pollution,” “alcohol drinking,” “asthma,” “depression,” “diet,” “exercise,” “obesity,” “pregnancy,” “sexual behavior,” and “smoking”).

The news coverage for seven public health issues, “Smoking,” “Exercise,” “Alcohol drinking,” “Diet,” “Obesity,” “Depression,” and “Asthma” decreased over time. The news coverage for “Sexual behavior,” “Pregnancy,” and “Air pollution” fluctuated during 2007–2017. The sentiments of the news articles for three of the public health issues, “exercise,” “alcohol drinking,” and “diet” were predominately positive and associated such as “energy.” Sentiments for the remaining seven public health issues were mainly negative, linked to negative terms, e.g., diseases. The results of topic modeling reflected the media’s focus on public health issues.

Text mining methods may address the limitations of traditional qualitative approaches. Using big data to understand public health needs is a novel approach that could help clinical and translational science awards programs focus on community-engaged research efforts to address community priorities.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is a critical component of translation, dissemination, implementation, and improvement (TDII) science. Yet, little is known about effective frameworks and practices regarding interdisciplinary research in TDII.

This study drew on data collected from an expert panel during a regional symposium.

Findings highlight facilitators and barriers to stimulating interdisciplinary TDII research in different domains: intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, power and hierarchy, physical environment, and communication and language.

Findings have significant implications for TDII of clinical practices.

The Learning Health System Network clinical data research network includes academic medical centers, health-care systems, public health departments, and health plans, and is designed to facilitate outcomes research, pragmatic trials, comparative effectiveness research, and evaluation of population health interventions.

The Learning Health System Network is 1 of 13 clinical data research networks assembled to create, in partnership with 20 patient-powered research networks, a National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network.

Herein, we describe the Learning Health System Network as an emerging resource for translational research, providing details on the governance and organizational structure of the network, the key milestones of the current funding period, and challenges and opportunities for collaborative science leveraging the network.

Rigor and reproducibility are two important cornerstones of medical and scientific advancement. Clinical and translational research (CTR) contains four phases (T1–T4), involving the translation of basic research to humans, then to clinical settings, practice, and the population, with the ultimate goal of improving public health. Here we provide a framework for rigorous and reproducible CTR.

In this paper we define CTR, provide general and phase-specific recommendations for improving quality and reproducibility of CTR with emphases on study design, data collection and management, analyses and reporting. We present and discuss aspects of rigor and reproducibility following published examples of CTR from the literature, including one example that shows the development path of different treatments that address anaplastic lymphoma kinase-positive (ALK+) non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

It is particularly important to consider robust and unbiased experimental design and methodology for analysis and interpretation for clinical translation studies to ensure reproducibility before taking the next translational step. There are both commonality and differences along the clinical translation research phases in terms of research focuses and considerations regarding study design, implementation, and data analysis approaches.

Sound scientific practices, starting with rigorous study design, transparency, and team efforts can greatly enhance CTR. Investigators from multidisciplinary teams should work along the spectrum of CTR phases, and identify optimal practices for study design, data collection, data analysis, and results reporting to allow timely advances in the relevant field of research.

The purpose of this scoping review is two-fold: to assess the literature that quantitatively measures outcomes of mentorship programs designed to support research-focused junior faculty and to identify mentoring strategies that promote diversity within academic medicine mentoring programs.

Studies were identified by searching Medline using MESH terms for mentoring and academic medicine. Eligibility criteria included studies focused on junior faculty in research-focused positions, receiving mentorship, in an academic medical center in the USA, with outcomes collected to measure career success (career trajectory, career satisfaction, quality of life, research productivity, leadership positions). Data were abstracted using a standardized data collection form, and best practices were summarized.

Search terms resulted in 1,842 articles for title and abstract review, with 27 manuscripts meeting inclusion criteria. Two studies focused specifically on women, and four studies focused on junior faculty from racial/ethnic backgrounds underrepresented in medicine. From the initial search, few studies were designed to specifically increase diversity or capture outcomes relevant to promotion within academic medicine. Of those which did, most studies captured the impact on research productivity and career satisfaction. Traditional one-on-one mentorship, structured peer mentorship facilitated by a senior mentor, and peer mentorship in combination with one-on-one mentorship were found to be effective strategies to facilitate research productivity.

Efforts are needed at the mentee, mentor, and institutional level to provide mentorship to diverse junior faculty on research competencies and career trajectory, create a sense of belonging, and connect junior faculty with institutional resources to support career success.

The University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research hub supports multiple pilot award programs that engage cross-disciplinary Translational Teams. To support those teams, our Team Science group aims to offer a learning experience that is accessible, active, and actionable. We identified Collaboration Planning as a high-impact intervention to stimulate team-building activities that provide Translational Team members with the skills to lead and participate in high-impact teams.

We adapted the published materials on Collaboration Planning to develop a 90-minute facilitated intervention with questions in 10 areas, presuming no previous knowledge of Science of Team Science (SciTS) or team-science best practices. Attendees received a short follow-up survey and submitted a written collaboration plan with their first quarterly progress report.

Thirty-nine participants from 13 pilot teams from a wide range of disciplines engaged in these sessions. We found that teams struggled to know who to invite, that some of our questions were confusing and too grounded in the language of SciTS, and groups lacked plans for managing their information and communications. We identified several areas for improvement including ensuring that the process is flexible to meet the needs of different teams, continuing to evolve the questions so they resonate with teams, and the need to provide resources for areas where teams needed additional guidance, including information and data management, authorship policies, and conflict management.

With further development and testing, Collaboration Planning has the potential to support Translational Teams in developing strong team dynamics and team functioning.

There is discontent and turnover among faculty at US academic health centers because of the challenges in balancing clinical, research, teaching, and work–life responsibilities in the current healthcare environment. One potential strategy to improve faculty satisfaction and limit turnover is through faculty mentoring programs.

A Mentor Leadership Council was formed to design and implement an institution-wide faculty mentoring program across all colleges at an academic health center. The authors conducted an experimental study of the impact of the mentoring program using pre-intervention (2011) and 6-year (2017) post-intervention faculty surveys that measured the long-term effectiveness of the program.

The percent of faculty who responded to the surveys was 45.9% (656/1428) in 2011 and 40.2% (706/1756) in 2017. For faculty below the rank of full professor, percent of faculty with a mentor (45.3% vs. 67.1%, P < 0.001), familiarity with promotion criteria (81.7% vs. 90.0%, P = 0.001), and satisfaction with department’s support of career (75.6% vs. 84.7%, P = 0.002) improved. The percent of full professors serving as mentors also increased from 50.3% in 2011 to 68.0% in 2017 (P = 0.002). However, the percent of non-retiring faculty considering leaving the institution over the next 2 years increased from 18.8% in 2011 to 24.3% in 2017 (P = 0.02).

Implementation of an institution-wide faculty mentoring program significantly improved metrics of career development and faculty satisfaction but was not associated with a reduction in the percent of faculty considering leaving the institution. This suggests the need for additional efforts to identify and limit factors driving faculty turnover.

The patient portal may be an effective method for administering surveys regarding participant research experiences but has not been systematically studied.

We evaluated 4 methods of delivering a research participant perception survey: mailing, phone, email, and patient portal. Participants of research studies were identified (n=4013) and 800 were randomly selected to receive a survey, 200 for each method. Outcomes included response rate, survey completeness, and cost.

Among those aged <65 years, response rates did not differ between mail, phone, and patient portal (22%, 29%, 30%, p>0.07). Among these methods, the patient portal was the lowest-cost option. Response rates were significantly lower using email (10%, p<0.01), the lowest-cost option. In contrast, among those aged 65+ years, mail was superior to the electronic methods (p<0.02).

The patient portal was among the most effective ways to reach research participants, and was less expensive than surveys administered by mail or telephone.