Join Us for 2016 Research Community Forum Annual Meeting: Break Down Barriers to Clinical Research

Join Us for 2016 Research Community Forum Annual Meeting: Break Down Barriers to Clinical Research

Michael A. Thompson, FASCO, MD, PhD

@mtmdphd
Aug 08, 2016

The ASCO Research Community Forum is gearing up for its 2016 Annual Meeting on September 26, at ASCO headquarters in Alexandria, VA. As Chair of the Research Community Forum Council, I’m very excited about what’s in store for this year’s meeting and would like to encourage all researchers and research staff to join us for this enriching event.

This has been a transformative year for the Research Community Forum. Originally established in 2010 as the Community Research Forum, the Forum was created to support clinical investigators and community-based research sites. Since then, the Forum has had great success in fostering collaboration between researchers and developing resources and tools to help support research program management. Building on this success, ASCO made the decision earlier this year to expand the scope of the Forum to provide support to all types of research sites, both in the community and academic setting. Now called the ASCO Research Community Forum, the Forum is here to support research sites of all types and sizes, and I’d like to invite you to join in this important opportunity.

The Forum has already been involved in a number of initiatives this year to create solutions to support ASCO’s entire research community, including the ASCO-AACI Best Practices in Cancer Clinical Trials Initiative, spearheaded by ASCO Past President Julie M. Vose, MD, MBA, FASCO, and recent publications about clinical trial-associated workload and negotiating clinical trial contracts. Our work will only grow from here.

Each year, the Forum holds its Annual Meeting to bring together researchers and research staff from across the country to connect, collaborate, and solve problems facing cancer research sites today.

The Research Community Forum Annual Meeting is about more than just discussing problems and challenges experienced by cancer researchers—it’s about sharing best practices and developing solutions. Attendees will have the opportunity to collaborate and share ideas through breakout session on topics related to administrative and regulatory burden, including insurance coverage analyses, sharing tips and best practices, utility and uptake of tools and resources developed by various groups (such as ASCO, TransCelerate, and CTTI). The meeting will also include presentations by leaders in the cancer research field and panel discussions will be led by physician investigators and research staff from research programs across the US on key topics impacting cancer research, such as:

  • Novel trial designs in community-based research
  • Improving clinical trial access, accrual, awareness, and engagement
  • The role of research in value-based care

Additionally, this year’s meeting has a compelling focus: bringing the research community together to share collective wisdom. We look forward to building off the important work started at the 2016 ASCO Annual Meeting, through Dr. Vose’s vision of “Collective Wisdom.” She will give the keynote address at the Research Community Forum Annual Meeting, exploring how collective wisdom can be applied to improve cancer research across the country.

There are still so many barriers to effectively conducting cancer research. The Research Community Forum Annual Meeting gives us the opportunity to take crucial steps forward to address these challenges. We need your help and your ideas to help us continue to make progress against cancer by reducing barriers and improving processes to make it easier for practices to participate in research.

Register and find out more about the Research Community Forum Annual Meeting. I also encourage you to take advantage of the Research Community Forum’s helpful tools and resources for research sites, including the new, online version of the ASCO Research Program Quality Assessment Tool, the ASCO Clinical Trial Workload Assessment Tool, and an online repository of resources, as well as news about our ongoing projects.

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