Jennifer E. DeVoe, MD, DPhil; Sonja Likumahuwa-Ackman, MID, MPH; Heather Angier, PhD, MPH; Nathalie Huguet, PhD; Deborah J. Cohen, PhD; Susan A. Flocke, PhD; Miguel Marino, PhD; Rachel Gold, PhD, MPH
Corresponding Author: Sonja Likumahuwa-Ackman, MID, MPH; Oregon Health & Science University. Email: likumahu@ohsu.edu
Section: Brief Report
Background: Primary care Practice-based Research Networks (PBRNs) are critical laboratories for generating evidence from real-world settings, including studying natural experiments. Primary care’s response to the novel coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic is arguably the most impactful natural experiment in our lifetime. The OCHIN PBRN and the BRIDGE-C2 Center: Evaluating the Impact of COVID-19. We briefly describe the OCHIN PBRN of community health centers (CHCs), its partnership with implementation scientists, and how we are leveraging this infrastructure and expertise to create a rapid research response evaluating how CHCs across the country responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 Research Roadmap: Our research agenda focuses on asking: How has care delivery in CHCs changed due to COVID-19? What impact has COVID-19 had on the delivery of preventive services in CHCs? What PBRN services (e.g., data surveillance, training, evidence synthesis) are most impactful to real-world practices? What decision-making strategies were used in the PBRN and its practices to make real-time changes in response to the pandemic? What critical factors in successfully and sustainably transforming primary care are illuminated by pandemic-driven changes? Discussion & Conclusions: PBRNs enable real-world evaluation of practice change and natural experiments, and thus are ideal laboratories for implementation science research. We present a realtime example of how a PBRN ‘Implementation Laboratory’ activated a response to study an historic natural experiment, to help other PBRNs charting a course through this pandemic.