A Practical Approach to Establishing a Practice-Based Research Network Stakeholder Engagement Infrastructure

Introduction: While there have been several articles detailing the importance of stakeholder engagement in research broadly and in practice-based research networks (PBRNs) specifically, few of these articles offer a replicable engagement approach that is detailed enough to translate to another setting. The goal of this article is to offer a detailed example of building stakeholder engagement infrastructure that could be replicated or translated to other settings.

Approach: We offer a review of 1 regional PBRN's approach to building a stakeholder engagement infrastructure over a 2-year period by describing engagement activities deployed across a large, regional PBRN including a needs assessment around research and training conducted in each state of the network and a centralized conference where themes from that needs assessment were leveraged to produce a stakeholder-defined research agenda and elect a steering committee.

Results: Products from this process include the stakeholder-defined research agenda as well as a multi-level organizational framework for assessing facilitators and barriers in a large PBRN and an example of a framework of individualized stakeholder group preferences for engagement modalities.

Conclusions: This article presents a detailed timeline and replicable approach to building a stakeholder engagement infrastructure in a regional PBRN. This article details a practical process that is embedded in the lived values of practice-based research.