About ACCORDS
The Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS) is a nationally recognized research powerhouse across the T3-T4 research continuum, including health services, implementation, and translational research carried out in real-world settings. We provide consultations, education, and mentoring to faculty to create highly competitive and pace-setting T3-T4 studies/grant applications. Ten methodological Cores support researchers through idea inception, grant submission/ re-submission, grants management, study implementation, and dissemination. We are also an incubator for research leadership in the T3-T4 space by training new investigators through our several career development/fellowship training programs.
What is T3 and T4 research?
Translational research is the process of turning observations into interventions that improve health. Research at ACCORDS encompasses the NIH categories of T3 and T4 research, which focus on health outcomes or health services research as well as delivery science across the entire life spectrum.
ACCORDS History
ACCORDS was established as a new Consortium in 2014, joining and expanding two programs that had been highly collaborative for the previous 10 years. In 2022, ACCORDS became a Center on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. We are jointly supported by the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital Colorado through the Colorado Child Health Research Institute (CCHRI).
From the ACCORDS Director
ACCORDS Community,
EXTRAORDINARY is the word that comes to mind as I reflect on my first full year as director of ACCORDS. Extraordinary research, extraordinary accomplishments, extraordinary gatherings (and food!), and extraordinary people.
When I joined ACCORDS in January 2024, I shared my initial I4 vision (Inclusion, Innovation, Integration, Identity). This vision resonated with others and provided a structure to carry out our work together. I am happy to share some of our numerous successes over the past year using this framework.
Inclusion:
• Created three categories of ACCORDS collaborators: affiliate, investigator, and faculty.
• Conducted a content analysis to identify opportunities for collaboration and growth within ACCORDS, including a redesign of the Research Services Staff meeting and creation of action groups.
• Developing a bi-directional expectations document to emphasize strengths-based relationships between Research Service Professionals and Investigators.
Innovation:
• Identified “pain points” to mitigate to ensure ACCORDS investigators have the state-of-the-art resources needed to do innovative research.
• Combined existing and new processes/structures to support Cores in carrying out their pace-setting health services research.
• Created a new Research Services Professional lead position to work with the ACCORDS leadership team in representing research services staff voices and creative ideas.
Integration:
• Collaborated with department, division, and section heads to enhance ACCORDS’ role as the go-to resource for T3-T4 science across campus.
• Launched new processes for improving efficiencies for consultations, education, mentoring, budgeting, and hiring models to ensure our Cores are well-integrated into Departments and Schools across campus.
• Fostered new partnerships across Departments and Schools to further embed ACCORDS into T3-T4 research at CU Anschutz.
Identity:
• Developed metrics of success through a group-based modeling/participatory approach to show both traditional and forward-thinking metrics as we grow.
• Established the Training, Education, and Mentorship (TEaM) Core, with director Hillary Lum, MD, PhD, as director and Sarah Brewer, PhD, MPA, as co-director over education.
• Appointed two new Core associate directors: Laura Scherer, PhD with the Patient-Centered Decisions Core and Tyler Anstett, DO with the Learning Health Systems Core.
I am also thrilled to celebrate 10 years of ACCORDS! Thanks again for the warm welcome and I look forward to strengthening relationships and collaborations across the CU Anschutz Medical Campus for even greater impact in the years to come.
Thank you,
Jerica Berge, PhD, MPH, LMFT, CFLE
ACCORDS Leadership
Dan Matlock, MD, MPH ACCORDS Interim Director 9/1/23 - 12/31/23
Jerica Berge, PhD, MPH, LMFT, CFLE | ACCORDS Director
On January 1, 2024, Dr. Berge joined ACCORDS after a distinguished career with the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Berge’s research focuses on child and family whole-person health. She uses mHealth and state-of-the-art mixed-methods approaches to conduct prevention and treatment pragmatic studies within primary care and community settings with the goal of optimizing health for all children and families.
Mark Gritz, PhD Director of Operations
Jana Smilanich-Rose Director of Finance & Administration
Kayla Ross Human Resources Program Manager
Founding Director of ACCORDS Reflects on Success of the Center
Through multiple iterations, ACCORDS has remained a supportive environment for health services and outcomes researchers on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
When Allison Kempe, MD, MPH, professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, was developing her vision that would one day become ACCORDS, her goal was to provide a home for health services and outcomes researchers.
“I wanted a truly collaborative environment that would nurture both innovative new science with immediate implications for the real world and nurture researchers to develop in this area,” Kempe says.
Over the last 10 years, ACCORDS has trained and mentored many successful researchers and grown its expertise across 12 different cores and programs.
“I’m really happy with how things have developed because I think we have an extraordinary environment here. It’s collaborative, it’s multidisciplinary, and the excitement of working across many disciplines has been wonderful,” Kempe says.
ACCORDS Core Directors & Associate Directors
Our methodologic CORES provide support for the development of new projects, grant proposals for faculty, consultative support to investigators, as well as education and mentoring. Our core directors and associate directors leverage their expertise to advance pioneering research in their methodologies.
Kathryn Colborn, PhD, MSPH
Biostatistics & Analytics Core Director
Don Nease Jr., MD
Community Engagement and Outreach Core Director
Liza Creel, PhD Economic Analysis Core Director
Dan D. Matlock, MD, MPH Patient-Centered Decisions Core Director
Russell Glasgow, PhD Dissemination and Implementation Science Core Director
Katy Trinkley, PharmD, PhD
Learning Health Systems Core Director
Laura Scherer, PhD
Patient-Centered Decisions Core Associate Director
Jodi Holtrop, PhD Dissemination and Implementation Science Core Associate Director
Tyler Anstett, DO
Learning Health Systems Core Associate Director
Susan L. Moore, PhD, MSPH Mobile Health (mHealth) & Informatics Core Director
Mandy Allison, MD Prevention Research Center for Family & Child Health Director
Sarah Brewer, PhD, MPA Training, Education, and Mentorship (TEaM) Core Co-Director over Education
Sean O’Leary, MD, MPH Practice-Based Research Network, Director of COCONet
Brooke Dorsey Holliman, PhD Qualitative & Mixed Methods (QM2) Research Core Director
Mark Gritz, PhD Pragmatic Research and Trials Core Director
Hillary Lum, MD, PhD Training, Education, and Mentorship (TEaM) Core Director
DID YOU KNOW?
ACCORDS started as two programs, the Colorado Health Outcomes Program (COHO founded in 1998) and the Children’s Outcomes Research Program (COR founded in 2002). The programs joined together in 2014 to become ACCORDS!
Consultations & Collaborations
To ensure we provide cutting-edge and innovative research approaches for T3-T4 health services science, ACCORDS continually updates and adds new methodological CORES. Two cores that have fully launched this year:
• The Learning Health Systems (LHS) Core aims to assist researchers in collaborating with health systems to design and evaluate clinical programs or interventions to expedite knowledge generation to improve patient care and clinical processes within the system of care.
• The Pragmatic Research and Trials Core assists investigators seeking advice and guidance related to pragmatic research and trials in real-world settings, that need to consider context and perspective in the design and conduct of their research or trial. The Core also helps investigators identify and navigate additional consultations they need for a successful pragmatic study.
Multidisciplinary collaborations are key to ACCORDS growth and supporting investigators across the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
44 Departments & Divisions in the CU School of Medicine
SET UP A CONSULT WITH US
637 research consultations across 44 different campus departments/divisions plus 15 external partners.
140+ return users for grants.
College of Nursing
Denver Health
Veterans Affairs
School of Dental Medicine
Colorado School of Public Health
Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
ACCORDS
Two ACCORDS Cores and Their Directors Selected for Anschutz Acceleration Initiative
The patient-centered collaboration was one of nine proposals selected for funding.
ACCORDS faculty are set to launch and support 10 distinct projects over the next five years that aim to develop patient-centered decision support tools across various clinical domains as part of the Anschutz Acceleration Initiative.
Dan Matlock, MD, MPH, director of the Patient-Centered Decisions Core and Russ Glasgow, PhD, director of the Dissemination and Implementation Science Core collaborated on their proposal ‘Making Personalization the Standard Through Rapid Design, Implementation, Testing and Maintenance.’
The initial four projects were chosen based the expertise of the team members in each of their cores.
• Amy Huebschmann, MD, MS, associate professor in the Division of Internal Medicine and Glasgow will lead the primary care project.
• Christopher Knoepke, PhD, MSW, assistant research professor in the Division of Cardiology and Michelle Fullard, MD, MSCE, assistant professor in the Department of Neurology will lead the specialty care project.
• Larry Allen, MD, MHS, professor in the Division of Cardiology and Colleen McIlvennan, PhD, DNP, associate professor in the Division of Cardiology will lead the tertiary care project.
• Matlock, Laura Scherer, PhD, associate professor in the Division of Cardiology, and Channing Tate, PhD, MPH, assistant professor in the Division of Internal Medicine will lead the project focused on late-life care.
There will be six additional pilot projects funded using a competitive process over the next 3-5 years. The pilot projects will have to meet the same entry criteria as the initial four projects to be considered. The established criteria include issues related to high-stakes importance, multi-level engagement, patient and family centered focus, likelihood of future funding, scalability, sustainability, and equity.
Beyond the goal of applying their expertise to the first 10 projects, the investigators have a mission to make ACCORDS and the CU Anschutz Medical Campus the national go-to academic center for rapid and rigorous development, evaluation, implementation, and dissemination of personalized care innovations.
“We want to come up with methods that are exportable, so that someone knows to come to our site, use our methods, and can take this from concept to dissemination in two years,” Matlock says.
Grants Submitted & Awarded
Research Funding
$41,154,150 in Research Total Award Funding of which 45% was pediatric focused.
Grant Proposals
Supported 60 PIs to submit over 100 proposals across 29 different departments/divisions in 2023-2024, a 13% increase over the prior year.
Dissemination & Implementation + Health Equity + Community Engagement Approach
Our Dissemination and Implementation Core’s trailblazing work in creating a framework that blends dissemination and resulted in an AHRQ and NIH R01 application with perfect scores (i.e. 1st percentiles). Congratulations Amy Huebschmann, MD, MS and Mónica Pérez Jolles, PhD, MA!
Grant Success
37% success rate for all proposal types. 53% success rate for pediatric-related grants.
ACCORDS
Submitted grants will contribute $33M in total NIH award dollars to SOM’s overall Blue Ridge Rankings from FY24 – FY28.
$1 = $2
Working with ACCORDS results in a 113% ROI for investigators and their departments.
Early Career Faculty 17 career development proposals were submitted, and 5 new career development awards were received by ACCORDS PIs, for a 1:3 funding rate.
CU Faculty Awarded Funds to Study the Science of Engagement in Health Research
The new PCORI award will allow the team to improve engagement and equity in research.
Bethany Kwan, PhD, MSPH, associate professor of emergency medicine and an ACCORDS investigator, and Matthew DeCamp, MD, associate professor of medicine and the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, received a $2.1 million funding award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
Their new research study, ‘Characterizing Engagement and Equity in Research’ (CHEER), aims to find the best engagement methods for diverse research topics and communities.
“We’ve long known that engaging patients, families, and communities in research is the right thing to do,” DeCamp says. “Surprisingly, we don’t know the best way to do it. Our research project seeks to answer that question by testing different methods of engaging communities and assessing what works best and when.”
Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH/MSPH, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, and Sarah Brewer, PhD, MPA, assistant professor of family medicine and Co-director of the ACCORDS TEaM Core are helping to lead the three-year study.
In the project, six “CHEER teams” will bring together various underrepresented communities from refugee and immigrant communities, older adults, medically underserved populations, transgender communities, and racial and ethnic groups. The groups will participate in discussions on health topics including diabetes, mental health, dementia, caregiving, primary care, and disability services. Discussions will also focus on a series of equity topics including health literacy, cultural and language adaptations, and digital equity.
The teams are working in parallel, coordinated by an overall Engagement Team, with a separate dedicated Science/Evaluation Team following along. Community representatives are co-equal partners of each team.
“We consider engagement to be an ethical imperative,” Kwan says. “In research, it is something that must be done. We’re focused on the issues that these communities care about and making an impact by spending limited research resources, our brains, our dollars, on doing things that matter to people.”
Education
The Colorado Pragmatic Research in Health Conference (COPRH Con) is a national conference hosted by ACCORDS with the purpose of training and engaging researchers in methods and applications that support research with real world impact.
COPRH Con 2024 was a virtual conference, held June 4-5. Attendees joined poster sessions, conference talks, and workshops focused on the theme, “Innovations in Pragmatic Research Methods: From Data to Equity, Policy, and Sustainability.” Thank you to the year’s co-sponsor, Colorado Clinicial and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI) for making it a success!
Approximately 300 attendees from around the country joined the conference, representing researchers from different experience levels in pragmatic research – beginners to advanced/expert knowledge. The attendees participated in 11 hours of scheduled sessions, including two keynotes, two plenaries, networking time, a virtual poster session, three mini workshops, and six total breakout sessions on various pragmatic topics.
We're grateful for all of the ACCORDS investigators and research staff who were part of the event as speakers, attendees, and the planning committee.
MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THE NEXT COPRH CON JUNE 4-5, 2025!
1400+ attendees at 20 campus workshops & seminars and one internationally attended conference.
Dissemination & Implementation (D&I) Science Graduate Certificate Program graduated its 27th researcher in May 2024, with 42 researchers enrolled in D&I classes in the 2023-24 academic year and 16 accepted for Fall 2024.
Mentored 71 Anschutz Medical Campus faculty, fellows, and students. Including individuals from 32 Departments/Divisions in the SOM, with 17 Pediatric-focused mentees.
Mentoring
As an ACCORDS investigator, I have received support from the Dissemination and Implementation team through inclusion in the bi-weekly works-in-progress group meeting, two grants (e.g., R01 pending review and a funded U01) and through mentorship on writing two implementation science manuscripts. With respect to grants in 2023, I received a U01 (DK137272) entitled “NAVIGATE-Kidney: A Multi-Level Intervention to Reduce Kidney Health Disparities.” Dr. Russell Glasgow is a co-investigator on this U01 and he provided guidance on how to utilize the PRISM scientific framework to assess RE-AIM outcomes for one of our U01 aims. The NAVIGATE-Kidney intervention is a multi-level and culturally responsive community health worker intervention that provides support to Latino individuals with advanced kidney disease. Dr. Glasgow also provided feedback on an R01 that I submitted in the summer of 2024 that utilized the PRISM scientific framework to assess the implementation of health-related social needs assessment in the dialysis facility setting.
Separately, I attend the bi-weekly works-in-progress meetings during which different investigators present their research aims or works in progress focused on implementation science. I am also working closely with Drs. Russell Glasgow and Mónica Pérez Jolles on two manuscripts that describe the use of implementation science to develop clinical trials focused on improving kidney health disparities. Attendance at these meetings, mentorship, applied work on grants and manuscripts with Drs. Glasgow and Pérez Jolles has allowed me to grow my implementation science research skills and intersection with health equity, and to develop research collaborations and peer support. Lastly, I was invited to join the annual planning event this past year to contribute my ideas on how to continue to grow the dissemination and implementation team, team science, and implementation research on our CU campus.
Lilia Cervantes, MD, MSCS Professor, Department of Medicine
Director of Immigrant Health, Anschutz Medical Campus
Fellowships
Trained health service research leaders from primary care and sub-specialty areas to address the nation’s health care delivery challenges
ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship (APCRF) training post-doctoral professionals to become primary care research leaders in addressing the nation's primary care health delivery challenges.
The Surgical/subspecialists Clinical Outcomes Research (SCORE) Fellowship is designed to train outstanding physician-researchers in clinical translational and outcomes research, focusing on surgeons and subspecialists interested in research training.
ACCORDS Faculty & Staff
The ACCORDS Wellness Committee fosters a workplace culture that supports the highest level of personal and professional health and physical, mental, and social well-being at ACCORDS. The committee volunteers their time to hosting events each month to keep our ACCORDS community connected and having fun at work!
During the 2023-2024 fiscal year, the Wellness Committee hosted Rockies games, office Olympics, happy hours, climbing nights, autumn gathering, cookie exchange, Halloween door decoration competition, potlucks, coffee hours, a 5k race, Bike to Work Day, and much more.
Thank you, Kori Eberle, Bobby Evans, Dennis Gurfinkel, Steve Lockhart, Lucy Rodriguez, & Madonna Shafer, for dedicating your time to ACCORDS Wellness!
