The PATIENTS Program is Going National! What does that mean?

The PATIENTS Going National Initiative is about scaling the PATIENTS Program’s evidence-based approach for patient and community engagement beyond Baltimore. After speaking with patients, community leaders, advisors, and research participants, we realized that going national isn’t just about geography; it is about communities.

The PATIENTS Going National Initiative

Watch this short video from C. Daniel Mullins, PhD, executive director of the PATIENTS Program, as he tells us a little more about the PATIENTS Going National Initiative

The PATIENTS Going National Initiative

We want to build on our success in conducting patient-centered research and replicate the nationally renowned work the PATIENTS Program has conducted in West Baltimore in other cities and rural areas across the country.

What is a PATIENTS Community?

We want to impact the health of patients and communities, which begs the question: What do we mean by a “community” and how do we intend to work with communities to impact patient and public health?

The PATIENTS Program uses the term "community" to refer to any way in which patients or individuals come together with something they have in common, recognizing that despite that common identity the community may – and typically will be – quite diverse. The PATIENTS Program views communities in this context not as passive recipients of interventions, but rather as active co-developers in the research process through continuous and sustained engagement.

Click here to read more about how we view communities. 

An initial LinkedIn post requested suggestions for priority communities for the PATIENTS Going National Initiative. Responses to that post provided more than 150 suggestions.

Based on input from that initial post, we then worked with patients, community leaders, advisors, our directors of research, and other partners who work closely with the PATIENTS Program to narrow our list to 16 potential priority communities.

All communities are important and deserve to have their voices heard. The PATIENTS Program would like to include voices when designing, conducting, and sharing the results of health equity research. Over time, the PATIENTS Program hopes to partner with every community interested in health equity and patient-centered research.

In our initial year of Going National, we have the funding and resources to effectively partner with five communities. We have already narrowed down our list of 150+ potential priority communities to 16 communities, and we are now implementing a data-driven process to select the five new communities for 2025.

We look forward to announcing the five new communities with you next year and continuing our efforts towards health equity in research.

Thank you to our PATIENTS Going National Sponsors!

We are grateful for the support of our PATIENTS Going National sponsors - Bayer, AstraZeneca, and Novo Nordisk. Their support signifies their commitment to replicating our nationally renowned work to other cities and rural areas across the United States.

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