Clara Pelfrey is the Director of Evaluation for the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative, a large federally funded grant partnership between ǿմý and the four large health systems in Cleveland: the Cleveland Clinic, MetroHealth, University Hospitals and the VA Medical Center. Together they form a large infrastructure to promote transforming research discoveries into better health – a process called translational science – or more commonly referred to as transforming health from the “bench to the bedside”.
Although Clara has only been an evaluator for 10 years, she has helped advance evaluation in many ways in the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Consortium, a group of over 60 academic medical centers across the USA doing clinical and translational science. Clara and her colleagues pioneered a process for tracking and evaluating a community-based research consult service that was based at MetroHealth Medical Center called the Center for Reducing Health Disparities. (1) Using data from the CTSC’s consult request system, Clara helped develop a system for evaluating the cross-disciplinary and multi-institutional research project collaboration. (2) Doing translational science requires many different areas of expertise and so extensive collaboration is necessary, which is fostered by doing team science. To understand the breadth of team science approaches across the CTSA consortium, Clara and colleagues performed a qualitative analysis on submissions from a unique kind of survey called the “Great CTSA Team Science Contest”. (3) Bibliometrics, a method of measuring research impact, is the quantitative method of citation and content analysis for scholarly journals, books and researchers. Clara and her colleagues published several bibliometrics studies examining: 1.) The scope, influence & inter-disciplinary collaboration across all CTSA publications (4) and 2.) Evidence for early career success of translational science trainees, called KL2 scholars, (5) and 3.) A multi-CTSA hub study showing how well this method worked to assess trainee success more broadly.(6)
Clara’s proudest accomplishment is that she leads a research workgroup of like-minded evaluators involving multiple CTSA hubs called the Retrospective Case Studies in Translational Science. With this case studies group, Clara and her collaborators developed and published the first protocol to conduct this type of case study (7) and successfully lobbied the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science to create a unique manuscript category for the journal, the Translational Science Case Study. (8) In January 2020, Clara created and directed the Case Study Accountability Group with evaluators from 10 CTSA hubs who wanted to develop their own translational science (TS) case study. The group developed a classification system for the TS case studies that would facilitate cross-case analyses to better understand the translational process. In 2021, Clara and her colleagues at ǿմý published the first successful TS case study in JCTS. (9) Clara formed a new collaborative group to perform cross-case analyses (e.g. meta-analyses of multiple translational science case studies) to learn about the TS process and more specifically, the facilitators and challenges to conducting translational science.
Clara continues collaborating with CTSA evaluators on studies of COVID-19 research impact from the CTSA Consortium as well as studying how the research funded by the CTSA has informed public policy as well as clinical treatment guidelines. Taken together, Clara has significantly contributed to evaluation of clinical and translational research locally at ǿմý and nationally, in the CTSA Consortium, and deserves the OPEG’s Evaluation Recognition Award.
References
1. Pelfrey CM, Cain KD, Lawless ME, Pike E, Sehgal AR. . J Clin Transl Sci. 2017 Feb;1(1):33-39. Epub 2016 Dec 29. DOI: 10.1017/cts.2016.5.
2. Jake Luo, Carolyn Apperson-Hansen, Clara M Pelfrey and Guo-Qiang Zhang. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 2014 Nov 30; 14(1):106. DOI: 10.1186/s12911-014-0106-6.
3. Pelfrey, C., Goldman, A., & DiazGranados, D. (2021). Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 5(1), E154. DOI: 10.1017/cts.2021.812.
4. Llewellyn, Nicole, Carter, Dorothy, Rollins, Latrice, Pelfrey, Clara, DiazGranados, Deborah, Nehl, Eric. Evaluation in the Health Professions. Mar 27, 2019. DOI: 10.1177/0163278719839435.
5. Qua, K., & Pelfrey, C. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science. 2020.1-7. DOI:10.1017/cts.2020.516.
6. Qua K, Yu F, Patel T, Dave G, Cornelius K, Pelfrey CM. Scholarly Productivity Evaluation of KL2 Scholars Using Bibliometrics and Federal Follow-on Funding: Cross-Institution Study. J Med Internet Res 2021;23(9):e29239. DOI: 10.2196/29239.
7. Dodson, S., Kukic, I., Scholl, L., Pelfrey, C., & Trochim, W. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 2020, 1-7. DOI:10.1017/cts.2020.514.
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9. Qua, K., Swiatkowski, S., Gurkan, U., & Pelfrey, CM. (2021). Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 1-22. doi:10.1017/cts.2021.871.