Collaborative ECHO research led by Elissa Faro, PhD, of the University of Iowa, investigates what factors contribute to the success of large, multi-site research programs, like ECHO. The research team interviewed 24 ECHO investigators and staff, and found that communication and working as a team were important for successful collaboration. Most interviewees expressed a desire for more opportunities for direct connection, learning, and sharing with their colleagues. Overall, respondents felt the ECHO Program excels at conducting solution-oriented, high-impact child health research, but also that the Program has an opportunity to further improve communication, collaboration, and decision-making across its vast network of sites and components. This research, titled “A Mixed-Methods Analysis to Understand the Implementation of a Multi-stakeholder Research Consortium: Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO),” is published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science.
Large research collaboratives often have more success than single investigators conducting research alone. They produce more publications in journals with higher impact factors that result in more citations and continued research opportunities. As a result, funding agencies continue to increase their support for large, transdisciplinary research groups to address complex and challenging health problems. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) ECHO Program developed multi-site collaboration strategies to promote high-impact, collaborative, observational research on child health. Few studies have investigated the perspectives of researchers and staff of large research projects like ECHO, and many questions remain about what factors influence the success of team science. To address these questions, ECHO researchers sought to develop an in-depth understanding of the elements and conditions that influence the implementation of observational research in the ECHO Program.
In early 2022, researchers conducted 24 virtual interviews. The research team interviewed internal stakeholders from ECHO study sites and components, seeking broad representation of research and administrative roles across ECHO. Most interviewees were affiliated with an ECHO study site, but the research team was also able to gather the perspectives of all ECHO Program components except for the Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource (HHEAR)—the ECHO component responsible for testing samples from ECHO participants to help researchers assess the effects of chemical exposures—and the NIH.
The research team developed a semi-structured interview guide, and analyzed both the quantitative and qualitative data collected to understand how individual researcher’s experiences and perspectives reflect the overall implementation of the ECHO Program. As part of this analysis, the researchers tracked metrics organized around four central goals: (1) enrolling and retaining a large and diverse group of participants in ECHO to answer key scientific questions; (2) collecting high-quality data and making it available for analysis; (3) collecting, storing, and using biospecimen samples and data; and (4) publishing and disseminating high-quality, impactful science. These metrics provide complementary, quantitative assessment of ECHO implementation and progress toward key goals and priorities.
This study contributes insight on the implementation of large, multidisciplinary research consortium, and these lessons may be transferable to other large research consortia.
“ECHO researchers highly value team science, co-learning, and collaboration,” Dr. Faro said. “The range of experiences across the program suggests that best practices for large research ventures like ECHO may not be one-size-fits-all but may instead need to be tailored for different groups.”