Lessons Learned (and Published)

We are excited to announce our latest publication, titled Community engagement to pilot electronic patient-reported outcomes (e-PROs) in early intervention: Lessons learned, in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science. This manuscript is the second phase of university-community partnership involving the implementation of an e-PRO in early intervention. As compared to the first pilot phase, this paper outlines our process for resolving a number of new and unanticipated challenges when partnering to implement this e-PRO with the largest early intervention program in Denver Metro. We have been working diligently since last August to prepare this manuscript.

This manuscript takes the form of a commentary, whereby we describe our responses to a number of roadblocks with study recruitment over more than a year. For example, our study enrollment was 9 participants over 5 months. We pursued multiple IRB amendments and countless phases of experimentation with revised protocols to improve enrollment rates. Due to these efforts, we just celebrated our 100th participant.

For me (Briana), coordinating the current leg of the project and earning co-authorship on two papers from this part of the lab's portfolio has formed a strong foundation for my OTD capstone project that will focus on building provider capacity for research engagement. When embarking on research, there are no guarantees as to what the outcome will be. This publication details how our team responded to what appeared to be a “failure” at that time, and how we plan to improve recruitment outcomes through community engagement in future scale-up studies. From this experience, we developed a lab poster that reminds us of what John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.”