Translating Research into Practice: The Colorectal Cancer Screening Experience

Excerpt

Although funding for research has increased dramatically over the last 30 years, the rate of its application to human health at the clinical or population level has lagged far behind. There are numerous examples of delays in the transfer of research-proven interventions to widespread application in routine clinical practice.1 This phenomenon has been labeled the “research valley of death,”2 and the need to better understand and mitigate this delay in the process of “bench to bedside” applications has led to conceptualization of the translational research paradigm. This process has been described as consisting of a number of steps: the T1 to T2 step relates to the transfer of basic sciences discoveries to patients, and the T2 to T3 step represents the transfer of clinical research-proven interventions to widespread clinical practice. In this issue of JGIM, Hendren et al.3 describe the findings of a multimodal breast and colorectal cancer screening intervention conducted in an inner city primary care practice. They report an increase in screening rates of a statistically significant 21 percentage points for colorectal cancer screening and 13 percentage points for mammography (a non-significant increase). This study, the topic, and the health intervention highlight some of the challenges and issues associated with translating research into clinical practice. …