Project Summary
This project is designed to address the question of how peers can be more fully and meaningfully engaged in comparative effectiveness research (CER). Peers are increasingly recognized as an important asset in healthcare, typically via peer support. Yet peers in healthcare have participated almost exclusively in the delivery of care rather than in the research on care. Our proposed solution is to create a free online resource hub to help enhance peers’ and researchers’ capacity to engage in collaborative CER. The resource hub will be an interactive website to create an online community for peer/researcher CER collaboration. It will allow for social networking, and will offer a rich trove of materials for viewing and downloading to help guide peer/researcher CER research. It will address conceptual, practical, and emotional issues, and it will be iteratively developed with stakeholder involvement throughout.
The projected output from this project is a free online resource hub to engage peers and researchers capacity to engage in collaborative CER with webinars, downloadable resources, case examples, and a message board.
Project collaborators include the National Council of Behavioral Health; peer veterans; and a peer specialist.