Promotion and tenure for community-engaged research: an examination of promotion and tenure support for community-engaged research at three universities collaborating through a Clinical and Translational Science Award.

INTRODUCTION: Community-engaged health research, an approach to research which includes the participation of communities, promotes the translation of research to address and improve social determinants of health. As a way to encourage community-engaged research, the National Institutes of Health required applicants to the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) to include a community engagement component. Although grant-funding may support an increase in community-engaged research, faculties also respond to the rewards and demands of university promotion and tenure standards. This paper measures faculty perception of how three institutions funded by a CTSA support community-engaged research in the promotion and tenure process. METHODS: At three institutions funded by a CTSA, tenure track and nontenure track faculty responded to a survey regarding perceptions of how promotion and tenure committees value community-engaged research. RESULTS: Faculty view support for community-engaged research with some reserve. Only 36% agree that community-engaged research is valued in the promotion and tenure process. DISCUSSION: Encouraging community-engaged scholarship requires changing the culture and values behind promotion and tenure decisions. Institutions will increase community-engaged research and more faculty will adopt its principles, when it is rewarded by promotion and tenure committees.

Incorporating geospatial capacity within clinical data systems to address social determinants of health.

Linking electronic health record (EHR) systems with community information systems (CIS) holds great promise for addressing inequities in social determinants of health (SDH). While EHRs are rich in location-specific data that allow us to uncover geographic inequities in health outcomes, CIS are rich in data that allow us to describe community-level characteristics relating to health. When meaningfully integrated, these data systems enable clinicians, researchers, and public health professionals to actively address the social etiologies of health disparities.This article describes a process for exploring SDH by geocoding and integrating EHR data with a comprehensive CIS covering a large metropolitan area. Because the systems were initially designed for different purposes and had different teams of experts involved in their development, integrating them presents challenges that require multidisciplinary expertise in informatics, geography, public health, and medicine. We identify these challenges and the means of addressing them and discuss the significance of the project as a model for similar projects.