By Zoë H. Hammatt, Junko Nishitani, Kevin C. Heslin, M. Theresa Perry
Research with meaningful community-academic partnerships is an emerging discipline critical to improving patient outcomes. This is particularly important in minority and underserved communities, where community participation in protocol development plays a vital role in helping ensure the ethical conduct of research. Multi-institutional studies often involve redundant review by institutional review boards (IRBs), which can lead to delays in study implementation without necessarily increasing protection of human participants.1 Review by IRBs is further complicated with collaborative studies across states and geographic regions. Centralizing the IRB process has been proposed to reduce variability, delays, and … Read More