Practice-based research is community engagement.

Community engagement has become a major contributor to medical research during the past 10 years and is an essential component of the current National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program. But, what is a community? And what community gets to be engaged? Kerr White described one of the major problems with clinical research in the United States as using the tertiary academic medical center as the main location of research ideas and subject recruitment. He pointed out that the vast majority of research was conducted on the 0.1% of the population who were cared for in the academic tertiary hospital. Coupled with this problem of location was the problem of the approach that did clinical research on subjects, ignoring their unique cultural, ethnic, and geographic identity, and which focused primarily on the interests of the researchers. As a consequence, much of the research was not readily translated into practice, nor was it reflective of clinical problems experienced in non-tertiary settings. Preceding the NIH initiative and now experienced at an accelerated tempo, many researchers have responded to these problems by moving their research enterprise into the community, directly engaging the community in their research and programs. Practice-based research provides a model that mixes scientific inquiry and community engagement. However, practice-based research has faced growing confusion surrounding the terms community and engagement.