The Greater Plains Collaborative (GPC CRN)

The Greater Plains Collaborative (GPC) CRN is a partnership between 12 leading medical centers in the central United States and is led by the University of Kansas Medical Center. GPC is committed to improving healthcare delivery through the conduct of patient-centered outcomes research and by efficiently disseminating research results and increasing the adoption of evidence-based practices.

GPC is committed to providing the data and research infrastructure to develop and support diverse, patient-centered research. GPC is advancing more complete and comprehensive data sets for research by linking its clinical data to complementary data sources, including a tumor registry and Medicare and Medicaid claims. This provides a more complete picture of patients’ healthcare experience and is essential in providing the necessary depth of data for real-world evidence studies. To maximize research opportunities, GPC actively engages with a multitude of different stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, health system leaders, and investigators. The network promotes a culture that is inclusive of all stakeholder perspectives, fostering open dialogue and transparent communication. To uphold GPC’s patient-centric model, patient engagement is a network priority with each site housing their own Patient Engagement Officer and patient stakeholder.

GPC is managed by the Governance Council (GC), consisting of the network and site-level principal investigators. The GC approves internal policies and addition of new members to the network and oversees the overall data infrastructure of the network. The GC is advised by the Patient Advisory Council, which provides patient perspectives on data usage and patient engagement in study development; the Health Systems Advisory Council, consisting of health system leaders to advise and prioritize how to disseminate and implement PCORnet innovations into clinical practice; and the Clinical and Translational Science (CTSI) Advisory Council, which includes all CTSI principal investigators and aligns GPC’s infrastructure with national research priorities.

PCORnet is intended to serve as a national resource for conducting rapid, efficient, patient-centered observational and interventional randomized research that improves healthcare delivery and health outcomes. Over the course of this project period GPC will enhance and optimize its network infrastructure to support a variety of patient-centered studies by:

• Ensuring meaningful engagement of patients, caregivers, clinicians, delivery systems, payors, and researchers, in all phases of the research process
• Operating through a network model in which data remains at the source while allowing approved researchers within and outside the network to access it securely through a central point
• Facilitating the public sharing of resources and reusable tools to make research more efficient and reproducible
• Using the PCORnet CDM, which standardizes the data collected when patients receive care so that it is comparable across health systems and can be used for patient-centered outcomes research
• Using streamlined processes such as one central IRB for studies involving multiple systems and standardized data use agreements, to enable research to be quicker and more efficient

About PCORnet^® Clinical Research Networks (CRNs)