Sunday, April 17, 2016

It's alive!

We have received the signed contract from PCORI (backdated to April 1, thank you very much) that makes the project official.

Of course, many of us have been busy behind the scenes for many months getting ready to kick this machine into high gear.  They include 16 investigators, 3 consultants, 6 project staff, 9 site cluster leaders, 15 advisors, and many support staff at UVM and the collaborating institutions around the country. Soon, we will have site leaders and staff from 40 clinical sites as well, not to mention our sponsors at PCORI who put in great efforts to get this complex proposal through approval process.

Getting organized is a big challenge, so we have taken a divide-and-conquer strategy.  We split the work into 7 areas: Site Management, Practice Change, Education, Evaluation, Engagement, Dissemination, and an Executive team to coordinate it all.  The teams are being activated sequentially to try to keep the chaos to a minimum. Over the next few weeks, I will post descriptions of the teams and what they will be doing.

In the meantime, we are

  • putting together the subcontracts and work agreements that move funds from the prime contractor (UVM) to the various other participants and institutions. 
  • developing communication methods to keep all 90+ participants in the loop.
  • planning an investigators' meeting for August 25-26 in Burlington
  • developing the educational modules that form a big part of the intervention
  • refining the toolkit for the practice redesign teams
  • meeting with cluster leaders to identify and on-board the clinical sites
  • finalizing the data abstraction details,
  • recruiting a post-doctoral fellow, and
  • doing other stuff that I can't even remember right now...
So, please subscribe to the blog because I hope it will be the main way we do group communications. Feel free to comment, ask questions, make suggestions, post recipes or whatever else you like.

As always, thanks for your support.

Ben

1 comment: