CARE for Health Brings Research to Primary Care Settings

A few months ago in a director’s message, I talked about an important new National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative, Communities Advancing Research Equity for Health™ (CARE for Health™), spearheaded by the director of NIH, Monica M. Bertagnolli, M.D. This exciting program will bring clinical research opportunities to primary care settings. Today, I’m excited to share that the first round of grants has been awarded, and the work of delivering on the vision of the program has officially begun. 

At the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health’s (NCCIH’s) most recent Advisory Council meeting, we were privileged to hear about CARE for Health from Amy P. Patterson, M.D., of the NIH Office of the Director. During her presentation, Dr. Patterson shared how CARE for Health will help deepen our understanding of how to address persistent health disparities and build on programs that are part of the existing research infrastructure to engage patients in everyday care settings, including the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory.

According to the latest data, more than half of the one billion physician visits that occur each year are visits to primary care providers. Routinely embedding clinical research into primary care practices is a challenging but vital step in understanding whole person health. Primary care providers, who serve on the frontline of patient care, are most likely to see the full range of health challenges people face—across all diseases and conditions and across the lifespan—and more fully appreciate complex factors that can create barriers to better health. By engaging with patients and providers in primary care settings, researchers will gain new insights into the connections between these factors and the health of individuals. Importantly, however, a prerequisite for successfully embedding research into primary care is to ensure that conducting the research does not add additional burdens to practitioners already struggling under heavy workloads, as is often the case in primary care, especially in low-resourced settings. Overcoming this challenge is one of the main goals of CARE for Health. 

In its initial phase, CARE for Health will expand the reach of existing NIH-funded studies by matching them to established rural primary care research networks. The new award to Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) will engage with a study funded by the Helping to End Addiction Long-term^® Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative^®, and supported by the Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory. The study, called BeatPain Utah and led by Dr. Julie Fritz at the University of Utah, focuses on patients with back pain living in rural and low-income communities heavily impacted by the opioid epidemic. The BeatPain Utah trial will be able to recruit from the OHSU’s network of federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) with practices in rural locations as one of the first three trials linked to CARE for Health. The aim of the trial is to connect patients to nonpharmacologic pain care through FQHCs, offering telehealth visits to help overcome barriers to access. 

I’m deeply excited to see the thoughtfully designed CARE for Health program take flight with the newly announced research grants. The more we meet patients in diverse health care settings, the greater our opportunity to learn more about how best to promote whole person health. To succeed, we in the research community must explore not just the complex array of factors that set off the cascade toward illness and disease, but also the catalysts that can trigger healing and health restoration. Bringing the research lens to everyday primary care settings offers an essential window into the patient experience and promises to generate research insights that can translate into better health for all.