University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Receives Federal Funding to Improve Health Care Access Across the State

Across large areas of Oklahoma and the nation, primary care clinics are a lifeline, providing care for people who otherwise would have to travel many miles to see a doctor. To increase access to vital health care, the National Institutes of Health announced an ambitious new initiative to integrate NIH-funded clinical trials into routine patient care in medically underserved areas like rural Oklahoma and within Tribal nations.

With $1.2 million in initial funding, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences researchers will help the NIH build a nationwide infrastructure that ultimately will improve access to clinical studies and help primary care clinicians more quickly implement new medical evidence into the everyday care they provide.

“We are extremely excited to be at the table for this initiative. We believe we can contribute our decades of experience in primary care research and help the NIH interface with primary care,” said Zsolt Nagykaldi, Ph.D., professor and director of research in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the OU College of Medicine. Nagykaldi is one of four OU Health Sciences faculty members who are principal investigators of the grant.

The NIH launched Communities Advancing Research Equity (CARE) for Health™ as a pilot program last year with three “network research hubs” at Oregon Health and Science University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and West Virginia University. OU Health Sciences is funded in the second round of awards. Overall, NIH plans to invest approximately $30 million in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 to support research that is accessible to all and focused on meaningful health priorities.

OU Health Sciences brings a wealth of experience in these focus areas, having worked for years with more than 400 urban, rural and Tribal primary care practices across Oklahoma, on projects like cardiovascular disease management and prevention, pain and opioid management and COVID-19 testing.

Those efforts provide a solid foundation for building out a national research infrastructure that can accommodate primary care research studies over time in a connected approach. Much of the work of creating that infrastructure involves assisting individual clinics with study design, using the electronic health record for research, and communicating with eligible patients.

“Clinical research is still new to many rural primary care practices,” said co-principal investigator Juell Homco, Ph.D., MPH, assistant professor of medical informatics at the OU School of Community Medicine in Tulsa. “Part of what we will be doing is helping practices obtain data in a standardized way from their electronic health records. We have worked with 40 different electronic health records over the years, so we bring a lot of expertise there.

“Ultimately, we want to speed up the adoption of new evidence-based guidelines so that care is constantly being improved,” Homco said. “Currently, it takes an average of 17 years for results of clinical trials to be implemented into primary care practices. It shouldn’t take that long for the latest research to benefit patients.”

As a first step, OU Health Sciences will join an existing trial on improving functional outcomes for older adults who have been treated for cancer. The trial is led by the University of Rochester in New York, which does not have sufficient access to patients living in rural, underserved and Tribal areas. The trial is studying whether a standardized intervention involving survivorship health and exercise education combined with patient assessment can improve physical function. Importantly, OU Health Sciences will also evaluate whether the intervention is effective in rural areas with less access to resources – knowledge that will be critical for the network’s expansion.

Co-principal investigator Mark Doescher, M.D., an OU professor of family and preventive medicine, brings experience in helping primary care practices overcome barriers to participating in clinical trials. He also serves as the associate director for community outreach and engagement at OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center, whose oncologists can help primary care providers gain additional expertise in cancer survivorship care.

“The patients we enroll in this trial will have to overcome different hurdles than we see in an urban population,” Doescher said. “We are not just offering trials but addressing the factors that might keep a patient from successfully participating,” such as transportation, internet access and treatment delays.

A central component of OU Health Sciences’ participation in CARE for Health™ is the James W. Mold Oklahoma Primary Healthcare Improvement Cooperative, a unit within the Oklahoma Clinical and Translational Science Institute, an NIH-funded initiative that has partnered with primary care practices across the state for many years.

“CARE for Health™ adds to OU Health Sciences’ strategic focus on advancing Oklahomans’ health, joining with several ongoing research efforts,” said Tim VanWagoner, Ph.D., associate director of the Oklahoma Clinical and Translational Science Institute and an associate professor of pediatrics. “By working with primary care practices to design clinical studies that are relevant to patients’ lives, we believe we can make a positive difference in Oklahomans’ health and quality of life.”

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About the Project

The research reported in this news release is supported by the NIH Common Fund, managed by the Office of Strategic Coordinator in the Office of the Director, under award number OT2OD038371. The content of this news release is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Additional programs at OU Health Sciences involved with the work of this grant are OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center, through its NIH-funded center support grant; the Oklahoma Pediatric Clinical Trials Network; and the Oklahoma Tribal, Rural, Urban Cancer Screening Trial Access Hub (OK TRUST), part of the National Cancer Institute’s new Cancer Screening Research Network.