Poster 28 – The Pediatric Integrated Primary Care Research Consortium: Establishing Cross-Institutional Research Collaboration

Background: The idea of integrating behavioral health clinicians into pediatric primary care settings to promote health and wellness and mitigate developmental and behavioral health concerns for children and families was introduced over 50 years ago (Smith et al., 1967). However, pediatric integrated primary care (IPC) has only truly proliferated in the last decade. The rapidly growing practice of pediatric IPC has outpaced empirical evidence needed to guide that practice in the current healthcare climate, fueling a need for externally-valid research (Callejo-Black et al., 2020). Several authors have issued “calls to action” to address the immense need to produce supportive evidence around clinical, operational, and financial outcomes for pediatric IPC across a range of integration models (e.g., Asarnow et al., 2017; Lines, 2019; McCabe et al., 2020). Approach: In recognition of the need to more rapidly produce generalizable evidence for sustainability of IPC initiatives, members of the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association’s Pediatrics Special Interest Group (SIG) and the Society for Pediatric Psychology’s IPC SIG formed the Pediatric Primary Care Research Consortium (PIPCRC) in 2018. The mission of the PIPCRC is to stimulate, facilitate, conduct and disseminate collaborative research and scholarship in order to advance the science, practice, and policy of pediatric integrated primary care. Led by a steering committee of clinician-scholars, the PIPCRC holds regular meetings and has developed a structure for proposing and carrying out multi-center research. Outcomes: To date, 41 members from 23 organizations have joined the PIPCRC, and 13 different organizations have participated in novel research projects. Collaborative studies have resulted in 2 peer-reviewed publications (Hails et al., 2022; Petts et al., 2022) and 4 peer-reviewed conference abstracts. Several more products are in various stages of production.