NIH Collaboratory

The NIH Collaboratory podcast is the interview series of the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory, and its subject is the pragmatic clinical trial: research built into the everyday work of health systems. Episodes open with a short welcome from Adrian Hernandez, a co-PI and one of the series moderators. After that, the interviewer's chair rotates. Leslie Curtis, Kevin Weinfert and Patrick Hegarty each lead conversations, and so does Hernandez. Guests tend to arrive with something specific: a recent paper, results from an NIH Collaboratory Trial, a workshop keynote or a Grand Rounds presentation. That anchoring keeps the talk concrete. In 'Podcast 61: Evaluating Analytic Models for IRGT Trials', the conversation with Jonathan Moyer and David Murray weighs nested against crossed designs for individually randomized group treatment trials, and considers how serious cross-arm contamination has to be before it affects type I error rates. 'Podcast 60: Virtual Vigilance in Decentralized Clinical Trials' features Chris Lenzel, who heads the data science group at DCRI, on quieter points of failure: a wearable that does not deliver all its data, or a patient report entered through an app that the research team does not act on in time. In 'Podcast 58: INSPIRE', Shruti Gohil and Jeffrey Guy discuss a trial that used automated prompts to reduce unnecessary extended-spectrum antibiotic prescribing. The prompt had to address physician concerns in universal language and rely on EHR variables that most hospitals could mine. When real-time extraction fell short, they describe running sensitivity analyses to find a risk factor that could stand in. Julie Fritz and Sebastian Tong bring the BeatPain Study and PRaCTICe, a new network research hub. There, remote physical therapy drew on motivational interviewing, and one of them says it improved how therapists communicate in person too. Not every episode centers on a single study. David Zoss, who gave a keynote at a Collaboratory workshop, talks about his health system's investment in AI and ambient listening, including efforts to ease documentation burden and burnout in nursing. Emily O'Brien, following up her Grand Rounds talk on a decade of lessons from pragmatic trials, describes health systems whose first priority is delivering care and being paid for it. The gap between what researchers need and what clinical operations can spare comes up in several of these conversations. The register is collegial and technical: guests are introduced as colleagues and collaborators, and the vocabulary is type I error, power, structured data elements and sensitivity analyses. Each episode closes by pointing to RethinkingClinicalTrials.org for further resources. For methods, start with the IRGT conversation. For the bigger picture of research meeting health system realities, start with Emily O'Brien. The show offers the reasoning behind specific research decisions, told by the people who made them.