Clinical and Translational Research Studios: A Multidisciplinary Internal Support Program

The Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research implemented the “Studio” Program in 2007 to bring together experts to provide free, structured, project-specific feedback for medical researchers. Studios are a series of integrated, dynamic, and interactive roundtable discussions that bring relevant research experts from diverse academic disciplines together to focus on a specific research project at a specific stage. Vanderbilt’s Clinical and Translational Science Award supports the program, which is designed to improve the quality and impact of biomedical research. In this article, the authors describe the program’s design, and they provide an evaluation of its first four years. After an investigator completes a brief online studio application, a studio “manager” reviews the request, assembles a panel of 3 to 6 experts (research faculty from multiple disciplines), and circulates the pre-review materials electronically. Investigators can request one of seven studio formats: hypothesis generation, study design, grant review, implementation, analysis and interpretation, manuscript review, or translation. A studio moderator leads each studio session, managing the time (90 minutes) and discussion to optimize the usefulness of the session for the investigator. Feedback from the 157 studio sessions in the first four years has been overwhelmingly positive. Investigators have indicated that their studios have improved the quality of their science (99%; 121/122 responses), and experts have reported that the studios have been a valuable use of their time (98%; 398/406 responses). To achieve the health goals of the 21st century, researchers from multiple disciplines must bridge their differences and together address the challenging problems that face us. -- The Institute of Medicine, 20011 In 2005, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering called for a more robust engagement between medicine and systems engineering, management science, and information science to facilitate more rigorous, efficient, modern methods of research.2 Fundamental to the necessary expansion and interdisciplinary character of the successful future clinical research enterprise will be the development and support of clinical investigators who are not only capable of rigorous hypothesis generation, study design, and data analysis within their research area, but also proficient at moving beyond their own discipline to integrate advances in other disciplines to implement, evaluate, and spread creative interdisciplinary solutions. However, developing a formal infrastructure to provide, manage, and fund this transformed research process across academic disciplines has been challenging for academic health centers. In 2007, we developed a novel model at Vanderbilt University specifically to address these challenges, based on the premise that focused, timely, expert guidance from faculty representing multiple perspectives and disciplines would improve the quality and potential impact of today’s clinical and translational research. As part of Vanderbilt’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grant and its program, Translating Discovery into Practice, we invested the resources and organizational structure to implement and evaluate an innovative model of internal research support, which we have called a “Studio.” Herein we describe the Studio Program as well as the results of our evaluation of its first four years.