Cooperative Studies Group
The Cooperative Studies Group closely partners with each funded study, aiding with human-centered design, behavioral science considerations, planned implementation and community engagement, and providing supplemental statistical and cost effectiveness research expertise as needed. The task forces within this group review each funded protocol and provide composite reviews back to the teams highlighting major and minor suggestions for improvement as well as any “must dos.” Teams are then required to provide a “response to reviewers” with further discussion if requested by either reviewers of the project team. In addition, all teams participate in training in human-centered design through workshops and individual coaching of their project teams. The group is comprised of five task forces.
Behavioral Science Task Force
Value Assessment Task Force
Human-Centered Design Task Force
Statistics Task Force
Community Engagement and Implementation Science Task Force
Common Measures for AHA Health Care by Food Funded Studies
Central to the American Heart Association's Health Care by Food initiative is the integration of evidence-based practices and measurable outcomes. To track progress and impact, the initiative developed a set of Common Measures, a standardized set of metrics designed to facilitate the comparison of data across food is medicine research.
Shared metrics are vital for pooling data across studies, to produce more generalizable insights and to allow for more comparability between studies, moving us toward a better understanding of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions.
To improve fidelity for merging data sets and facilitating use of the common measures, an accompanying code book (XLSX file) was designed and is available for use.