Denver Health and Kaiser Permanente Launch First of its Kind Program

Denver Health and Kaiser Permanente have launched Colorado Patient Partners in Research (CoPPiR) - a unique program that connects patients with ongoing research studies. This first of its kind program allows patients to become contributing members of research teams on a variety of health topics. 

“CoPPiR believes that patients should have a voice in the way research is conducted to ensure studies and their outcomes are relevant to patients’ preferences, priorities and needs,” said Ed Havranek, MD and Denver Health’s Lead CoPPiR Investigator. “This program gives patients familiar with a particular health issue the opportunity to influence future research and possibly save other patients from facing challenges they may have experienced.”

By completing a brief questionnaire on the CoPPiR website and listing health topics of interest, Coloradans can be connected with a health research team.

Applicants, known as patient partners, who are connected with a research team have the opportunity to provide input on research study design and proposal development, develop patient enrollment materials and methods, provide feed-back on interpretation of study results and help communicate those results to patients.

“A patient’s personal experiences—from diagnosis to treatment—make them an expert in their health care. They’ve lived it and know first-hand what worked, what didn’t and what was missing for them,” says Sarah Madrid, lead project investigator for Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research. “We’re proud to work with Denver Health on the start of something great—a public network for Colorado patients and researchers to contribute to an important evolution in health research.”

Colorado researchers are able to access CoPPiR and can submit a request for patient partners based on the disease, health condition, age, gender or other demographics needed for their research topic or study.

Based on the patient partners’ online questionnaire responses, CoPPiR  provides potential patient partners with contact information for the research team and some basic information about the proposed research project. If the research topic is of interest, the patient partner can follow up with the researchers to learn more about the specific study and what role they could play on that particular research team.

Denver Health and Kaiser Permanente are actively recruiting Coloradans to join CoPPiR through a variety of outreach methods including emailed invitations and social media. All Coloradans, regardless of their health insurance status or coverage are encouraged to participate.

There is no fee for signing up for CoPPiR as a patient partner or for researcher requests but research teams are required to compensate all patient partners’ time once the partner has joined the research team.

The CoPPiR network is, in part, supported by a two-year, $250,000 Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award. PCORI, the Patient Centered-Outcomes Research Institute, is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 to fund comparative effectiveness research that will provide patients, their caregivers and clinicians with the evidence needed to make better informed health and healthcare decisions.

For more information and to learn how to sign up, please visit CoPPiR.org.