Session: Advancing Prevention Research at NIH (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

The NIH is a major funder of U.S. research that evaluates preventive interventions and their dissemination and implementation to inform public health policies. The NIH Office of Disease Prevention (ODP) is the lead Office at the NIH responsible for supporting this research. The goal of this symposium session is to illustrate how the ODP is engaged in activities that assess, facilitate, and stimulate research in disease prevention and health promotion. This collection of posters highlights ODP’s efforts to increase the scope, quality, dissemination, and impact of prevention research at NIH.

The first poster, “Systematic Characterization of the NIH Prevention Research Portfolio,” describes an innovative approach that the ODP is using to classify NIH grants according to a prevention research taxonomy and protocol developed by the office. The results show trends in study design and type of prevention research from over 3,000 type 1 R01 grants from FY2011-2014.

The second poster, “Applying Machine Learning to Prevention Research,” builds off of the work reported in the first poster in this symposium.  This poster combines a machine learning algorithm with portfolio analysis at NIH.  The results show the performance of this approach in identifying and classifying prevention research.

The third poster, “Insufficient Evidence (I) Statements of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force: A Rich Information Resource for Prevention Researchers,” reports on the dissemination of research gaps identified by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Using a theory-driven approach, the dissemination of research needs within NIH and to the prevention research community helps inform NIH funding policies and encourages new research to address critical knowledge gaps.

The fourth poster, “The Development of the Prevention Research Expertise Survey and Tool,” describes a Web-based survey and directory developed to improve the quality of NIH-funded prevention research.  This tool assists NIH scientific review officers in identifying researchers with expertise in specific prevention science methods and content areas for invitation to serve on NIH review panels.

The fifth poster, “Resources for Researchers: A New Portal to Assist Prevention Investigators,” details an online repository of various tools and resources specifically tailored to the needs of the prevention research community.

At the conclusion of this organized poster symposium, the discussant will summarize the mission-driven work of the ODP and moderate a discussion between the presenters and the symposium attendees.