An Innovative Approach to Enhancing Community Health Collaborations: A Community Engagement Directory

Context UT Southwestern utilizes community engagement strategies to improve health and integrate stakeholder priorities in clinical care and research. However, given the vast size of our medical center, many community engagement initiatives exist in silos and overlap in community areas creating inefficiency, inconsistency, and redundancy.

Objective To implement an interactive community engagement directory (CED) consolidating community partners, investigators, research and clinical activities to optimize bidirectional communication and collaboration, facilitating relationship-building and trust.

Study Design/Analysis Prospective evaluation design employs social network analysis to identify and visualize nodes of researchers, stakeholders, and community agencies that collaborate on projects.

Database/Analysis Our team built a SQL server relational database to house CED data and published a webpage using the Azure platform. Profile data describing community-engaged projects and the academic and community partners involved is published to the web and publicly accessible.

Population Studied Academic institutions and community organizations (i.e., social service, clinics) serving medically underserved populations in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas, USA.

Intervention/Instrument The UT Southwestern Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program’s Office of Community Health and Research Engagement serves as the broker and facilitator of connections generated by the CED.

Outcomes Measures # of investigators/learners; # of community organizations; # of studies/projects; % of partnerships translating to submitted/funded grants and publications; health topics/populations represented; diversity amongst users; perceptions among community partners

Results The CED has been developed and tested. Next steps include a soft launch during which we will solicit feedback from researchers and partner organization members of our community health coalition, which will inform further refinement. Baseline outcome measures will be collected and reassessed yearly.

Conclusions The CED will streamline the coordination of community engagement activities within a sprawling academic institution, expediting the translation of research evidence into the communities that need it most. Once fully refined, this model will be shared among CTSA consortium partners to help improve community-engaged translational science efforts on a larger scale.