About NJFMRN

History of the Network

Since 2001, the Department of Family Medicine at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School has been developing and operating the New Jersey Family Medicine Research Network, a practice-based research network of nearly 120 primary care practices, more than 300 physicians and approximately 750,000 patients. Participating practices are located in all 21 NJ counties in a variety of urban, suburban and semi-rural settings.

The network was initially developed in partnership with the New Jersey Academy of Family Physicians and the Departments of Family Medicine at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School and UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine and led by Benjamin Crabtree, Ph.D. In 2004 the Cancer Institute of New Jersey first provided infrastructure funding for the development of the network as a shared resource of the Cancer Institute and CINJ funding has provided a significant proportion of operating expenses over the past 5 years. The network is a Shared Resource of CINJ.

During the nearly 10-years since its establishment the network has served as the “laboratory” for a series of observational and intervention studies led by researchers from Family Medicine and other departments at RWJMS and NJMS as well as investigators from CINJ. These studies have brought more than $10 million in total research funding to UMDNJ and led to numerous research presentations and publications.

In March 2009, Jesse C. Crosson, Ph.D. was named the new Director of GSPR.

Mission and Objectives

The mission of the Garden State Primary Care Research Network (GSPR), a collaborative partnership between primary care practices and a multidisciplinary team of researchers, is to:

Improve the quality of health care through the generation of research findings that can inform and influence primary care practice and public policy.

The objectives of the GSPR are to:

  1. Collect observational data on practice patterns and trends in NJ
  2. Collect patient-level health surveillance data
  3. Serve as a research laboratory for clinical trials and other studies testing the effectiveness of interventions to improve the quality of care and health outcomes in primary care settings
  4. Disseminate key research findings and data reports to primary care clinicians to help improve their practices
  5. Provide brief reports to policy makers in NJ to inform public debates about how to improve primary care quality
  6. Educate the public about primary care in NJ

 

To meet these objectives the GSPR will track important health trends and patterns of care in NJ primary care practices and serve as a laboratory for conducting research on quality of care. Participating practices will provide access to the GSPR Research Coordinator who will collect data from each practice in order to create a core data set for longitudinal analysis of patterns of primary care in NJ.