Project Summary
The Minnesota Brain Aging Research Collaborative (M-BARC) is dedicated to fostering collaborative research to advance the field of dementia healthcare services. Our primary Tier II goal is to create a complete project team that will go on to develop a Tier III proposal for at least one dementia healthcare comparative effectiveness research (CER) research priority. A complete project team will include patients, healthcare providers/systems, community and government organizations, and formally trained researchers as equal partners. To further support this goal, we will use the efforts and materials generated in Tiers I–II to more fully articulate a dementia health services research agenda that will assist M-BARC to seek and respond to funding opportunities in the coming year(s). In Tier II, we will incorporate and expand on the work completed in Tier I (governance, recruitment, and list of CER ideas), and also focus on four key milestones: (1) engage and educate our advisory group through a series of didactic sessions, (2) develop and prioritize research questions utilizing a pre-defined research agenda matrix and prioritization framework, (3) foster awareness and support among stakeholders and influencers through outreach and communications, and (4) assemble and prepare our Tier III study team(s), which will result in a Tier III application. Our Tier II activities are designed to build capacity and foster relationships among our advisory group, as well as to progressively focus our scope and garner understanding and support from decision makers and influencers about the important role our research can play to help improve dementia health care.