The Patient and Community Engaged Research (PACER) Center aims to lead Baylor Scott & White Research Institute (BSWRI) toward optimizing and tailoring engagement strategies for patients of widely varying socioeconomic and health status, age, health literacy, geography, and identity for engagement with traditionally hard-to-reach patients across BSWH’s large catchment areas. Our PACER Center team has extensive recruitment experience with diverse populations using blended strategies to leverage resources and standardized protocols, while enlisting patient engagement and feedback.
Objectives:
- The PACER Center provides guidance and serves as a resource to investigators and front-line research staff for engaging and enrolling underrepresented populations
- The PACER Center provides support to research teams and investigators on the development of metrics for underrepresented populations participation in studies
- The PACER Center tracks metrics and monitors enrollment and recruitment progress with interested research study partners after identifying solutions to enrollment and retention challenges experienced
PACER team
Director
Katherine Sanchez, PhD, LCSW
PACER Center Director
Dr. Sanchez is the Research Center Director of the BSWRI Patient and Community Engaged Research (PACER) Center for the Baylor Scott and White Research Institute (BSWRI) of the Baylor Scott and White Health (BSWH) system. She leads a nationally recognized research program, funded by multiple federal and state agencies. The PACER Center guides BSWRI toward integrating a health equity approach across the research enterprise by facilitating the engagement, enrollment, and retention of populations historically underrepresented in research and clinical trials. The PACER Center also provides guidance and serves as a resource to investigators and research staff for engaging, enrolling, and developing metrics for broad representation in studies.
As the third daughter of a Mexican American immigrant mother in a single parent household in her native El Paso, Dr. Sanchez was indoctrinated with a strong sense of obligation and interdependency among people. She entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Austin after fifteen years of clinical social work practice, primarily in medical settings with uninsured, underserved Spanish-speaking populations. During her years of clinical social work practice, Dr. Sanchez cultivated an interest in and an understanding of the unique skills necessary for the provision of mental health services to monolingual Spanish-speaking populations. She is a clinician researcher with extensive experience in investigating effective interventions aimed at reducing behavioral health disparities and understanding the role of cultural and linguistic competence in health and behavioral health care delivery. She has examined the role of integrated behavioral health in reducing disparities in racial and ethnic minority populations, and has an additional research agenda to translate the evidence in integrated behavioral health care by training culturally diverse, bilingual social workers in evidence-based interventions proven effective for racial and ethnic minority populations. Most recently, Dr. Sanchez was awarded $7.5 million from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to establish the Texas Cohort of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Connect for Cancer Prevention study to enroll patients from geographically dense and rural, racially/ethnically diverse populations to leverage the clinical resources and research infrastructure of the largest non-profit integrated health care system in Texas. Dr. Sanchez is the BSWH representative to the governing board of the Health Care Systems Research Network (HCSRN). This network of 20 non-profit healthcare delivery systems was formed in 1994. She is the BSWH site PI for the NIH-funded Mental Health Research Network (MHRN) and the NIDA Clinical Trials Network (CTN) Addiction Research Network, Health Systems Node, both multi-health system networks which bring together researchers and research departments embedded in large and diverse healthcare systems in a population-based approach to transforming behavioral health care; with expertise in mental health research as well as epidemiology, health services, economics, disparities, outcomes & quality assessment, as well as conducting pragmatic clinical trials in our health systems.
Dr. Sanchez has been appointed by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to its Advisory Panel on Healthcare Delivery and Disparities Research (HDDR) where she applies her experience and expertise to helping PCORI refine and prioritize the research it funds and ensure that the research PCORI supports centers on the outcomes that matter to patients and other healthcare decision makers. Dr. Sanchez is a fellow of the Implementation Research Institute (IRI) and is well prepared and supported to conduct research on examining barriers and facilitators to implementing evidence-based interventions into low resourced settings, which holds high promise for reducing the mental health treatment gap for disparity populations in community practice.