The CTSA Consortium's Catalog of Assets for Translational and Clinical Health Research (CATCHR).

The 61 CTSA Consortium sites are home to valuable programs and infrastructure supporting translational science and all are charged with ensuring that such investments translate quickly to improved clinical care. Catalog of Assets for Translational and Clinical Health Research (CATCHR) is the Consortium's effort to collect and make available information on programs and resources to maximize efficiency and facilitate collaborations. By capturing information on a broad range of assets supporting the entire clinical and translational research spectrum, CATCHR aims to provide the necessary infrastructure and processes to establish and maintain an open-access, searchable database of consortium resources to support multisite clinical and translational research studies. Data are collected using rigorous, defined methods, with the resulting information made visible through an integrated, searchable Web-based tool. Additional easy-to-use Web tools assist resource owners in validating and updating resource information over time. In this paper, we discuss the design and scope of the project, data collection methods, current results, and future plans for development and sustainability. With increasing pressure on research programs to avoid redundancy, CATCHR aims to make available information on programs and core facilities to maximize efficient use of resources.

Using research metrics to improve timelines: proceedings from the 2nd Annual CTSA clinical research management workshop.

The Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Consortium Workshop was conceived as a venue to foster communication among academic medical centers (AMCs) in the development of methods to improve clinical research management. The consortium, comprised of 46 awardee sites as of 2009, many with multiple AMCs, is expected to expand to 60 sites when fully implemented. At the 2nd Annual CTSA Clinical Research Management Workshop held on June 22nd and 23rd , 2009, on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus, consortium members and potential CTSA sites gathered with stakeholders from private industry, the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration, and private research organizations, to formulate a plan to address challenges in clinical research management. Specific aims included improving protocol processing and sharing process improvement initiatives in the expectation that best practices will be implemented and improvements will be measured and reported. The findings presented at this workshop indicated significant variance in Institutional Review Board approval of protocols and contract execution by AMC and CTSA sites. Most represented marked delays compared to non-AMC sites and that, as a likely consequence, AMCs were later to enroll patients and/or meet enrollment targets compared to dedicated or professional sites.