Leadership, investigators and operations staff for the Vanderbilt-Miami-Meharry Center of Excellence in Precision Medicine and Population Health gathered at the University of Miami recently for a 100-Day Meeting to discuss the center’s progress since its kickoff in July and best next steps for achieving its goals.
Keynote speakers — Marisel Losa, MHSA, president and CEO of the Health Council of South Florida Inc., and Juan Carlos Arriola, PRC, chief strategy and research officer of Latinvisa Interamericas, LLC — represented communities and principal collaborative stakeholders in the center’s mission focus and research approach. The multi-institutional center team reviewed progress on first 100-day deliverables, generated evaluative metrics and strategized around inter-center information, process and activity distribution. The first 100-day tasks included:
• Characterizing clinical data across institutions
• Identifying resources to aid geocoding efforts
• Assessing availability of Vanderbilt University Medical Center BioVU protocol for dissemination
• Exploring ways to leverage grant research projects to drive socioeconomic phenotype discovery
Teams met throughout the day to promote cross-center collaborations and plan next steps for individual cores and research projects. The new center — which will enable research using approaches to precision medicine to eradicate health disparities, specifically those among African-Americans and Latinos — is the result of a five-year, $11.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
