Goal #2: Promote partnerships and collaborations

Including patients as collaborative research partners requires systems that enable it. Bridging the gap between patients who want to collaborate and meaningful, sustainable collaboration calls for a deeper understanding of patients’ interests, barriers, and facilitators to research engagement. To better understand these factors, a team at the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR) distributed a cross-sectional survey to a stratified random sample of 2001 adult Michigan Medicine patients. Read the article, “<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjamanetwork.com%2Fjournals%2Fjamanetworkopen%2Ffullarticle%2F2852540&amp;data=05%7C02%7Cegf%40med.umich.edu%7Ce6849f1b396c43d3015508df1279301d%7C1f41d613d3a14ead918d2a25b10de330%7C0%7C0%7C639249983831804190%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=q%2BoMVJDcBPZZZmwLMYPYVVp%2FNFP%2B2wxVskHNGlc5tUI%3D&amp;reserved=0" title="Original URL:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2852540

Click to follow link.">Patients’ Interests and Barriers to Research Partnerships Within an Academic Health System</a>,” in&nbsp;JAMA Network Open.

Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research

Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research logo

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University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

A team at the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR) distributed a cross-sectional survey to better understand patients’ interests, barriers, and facilitators to research engagement.

Patients’ Interests and Barriers to Research Partnerships Within an Academic Health System

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Goal #1: Advance clinical and translational science

Emory researchers, clinicians and data experts gathered Aug. 4-5 for the EPIC Cosmos Datathon, a collaborative event designed to accelerate health research through one of the nation's largest sources of electronic health record data.Hosted through a partnership among Emory Digital, the Emory Health Services Research Center and the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance, the event gave participants hands-on access to EPIC Cosmos, a de-identified database containing information from more than 300 million patient records nationwide.Working in multidisciplinary teams, participants spent two days exploring research questions that could benefit from large-scale clinical data, transforming ideas into potential studies while learning new approaches to data-driven investigation.“There's no other event like this where hours of time are blocked off with a bunch of other highly skilled people to concentrate on one specific problem,” said <a style="border:0px solid;box-sizing:border-box;color:oklch(0.3186 0.1166 257.73);margin:0px;padding:0px;text-decoration-color:inherit;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-style:inherit;text-decoration-thickness:1px;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://med.emory.edu/directory/profile/?u=LHOJAT">Leila&nbsp;Susan Hojat</a>, associate professor of emergency medicine in the School of Medicine. “You’re able to see how others think and approach a challenge.”The datathon was designed not only to introduce researchers to EPIC Cosmos’s capabilities, but also to foster new collaborations across the university and health system. Organizers encouraged teams to combine clinical expertise, research experience and technical skills to tackle questions with real-world implications for patient care.One of the top projects focused on severe maternal health complications following childbirth. Using EPIC Cosmos’s extensive dataset, the team explored patterns and outcomes at a scale that would have been difficult to achieve using local data alone. Their work produced promising early findings and established a foundation for future research.For many participants, the event demonstrated how access to broader datasets can speed the path from research question to discovery. Rather than spending months assembling data, teams were able to evaluate ideas, identify trends and refine study concepts within days.Organizers hope the datathon will serve as a model for future collaborative research initiatives at Emory, helping investigators uncover new insights while strengthening connections across disciplines.By bringing together people, data and innovative thinking, the EPIC Cosmos Datathon highlighted the growing role of large-scale health data in advancing research and improving patient outcomes.To read more details about the event, visit the Office of Information Technology’s&nbsp;<a style="border:0px solid;box-sizing:border-box;color:oklch(0.3186 0.1166 257.73);margin:0px;padding:0px;text-decoration-color:inherit;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-style:inherit;text-decoration-thickness:1px;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/oit/2026/08/26/emory-teams-turn-health-data-into-research-at-epic-cosmos-datathon/" title="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/oit/2026/08/26/emory-teams-turn-health-data-into-research-at-epic-cosmos-datathon/">Byte-Sized News</a>&nbsp;page.

Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance

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Emory University

Emory researchers, clinicians and data experts gathered Aug. 4-5 for the EPIC Cosmos Datathon, a collaborative event designed to accelerate health research through one of the nation's largest sources of electronic health record data.

Emory Teams Turn Health Data into Research at EPIC Cosmos Datathon

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Goal #3: Address health needs of populations

New research led by Oregon Health &amp; Science University suggests you should think twice about indulging in a late-night snack if you’d like to preserve liver health.The study, <a target="" rel="" class="externallink" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S154235652600755X?via%3Dihub" title="">published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology</a>, documents an increase in the correlation between people who reported late-night eating — defined as eating after dinner or after bedtime — and a heightened risk of two types of liver disease, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease and cirrhosis.Previous research has associated late-night snacking with heart disease and obesity, but in the new study, researchers set out to find a signal of liver disease in late-night eating.“A few studies have hinted at this idea, but this is among the first long-term analyses to explicitly draw the connection to fatty liver disease,” said lead author Robert Wilechansky, M.D., a hepatologist at OHSU who specializes in liver transplantation.Wilechansky noted that night shift workers grapple with misalignment of the body’s natural day-night cycle, with elevated rates of obesity and heart disease. With as much as 30% of the U.S. population affected by fatty liver disease, he wondered whether small changes in timing meals might make a difference.“We know the liver is very much in tune with the body’s circadian rhythms,” he said. “So we’re interested in changing the timing of eating in a way that could make a difference in health, without changing the composition of what people eat.”Researchers analyzed three large, preexisting nationwide datasets: the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="externallink" href="https://nurseshealthstudy.org/">Nurses’ Health Study, the Nurses’ Health Study II</a>, and the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="externallink" href="https://hsph.harvard.edu/research/health-professionals/">Health Professionals Follow-up Study</a>. They extracted diet and lifestyle habits self-reported by almost 200,000 participants in all three studies, grouped them by eating behaviors, and then looked for correlations to people who reported fatty liver disease or cirrhosis.They found a 20% to 30% increase in all forms of liver disease among the group of people who reported late-night eating compared to those who did not.“It’s important to remember, of the people who developed fatty liver disease, only a small fraction develop serious forms of the condition like liver cirrhosis,” Wilechansky said. “Even so, the big take-away here is that confining your calorie intake to several hours before bedtime might be beneficial.”<h2>New clinical trial</h2>A co-author who studies circadian rhythms said the new study builds upon previous research revealing the importance of the body clock to overall health.“We are seeing over and over again that the timing of behaviors, whether it’s sleep, eating or exercise, really matters,” said co-author Andrew McHill, Ph.D., associate professor and sleep and circadian physiologist at OHSU. “For example, we have shown that eating during the night, when the internal biological clock is promoting sleep, reduces the ability of your body to metabolize foods as efficiently and can eventually lead to obesity, diabetes and now poor liver health.”He noted that previous research in animal models reveals the liver to be one of the organs most susceptible to misalignment in timing between eating and sleep.Wilechansky cautions that the study is observational and based on broadly defined self-reported data, but it does provide a starting point for more research.To that end, he is part of a team at OHSU recruiting for a study that will monitor eating behaviors directly and see whether eating earlier improves clinical measures of underlying fatty liver disease. The new study provides a starting point to put the findings to the test.“Our findings add to the growing body of literature linking late-evening eating patterns to adverse metabolic and liver outcomes,” the authors write.In addition to Wilechansky and McHill, co-authors include Kevin Casey, M.P.H., Andrew Chan, M.D., Ph.D., and Tracey Simon, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.The research was supported by the American Association of the Study of Liver Diseases Foundation, award CTORA24-179910.

Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute

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Oregon Health & Science University

Research led by Robert Wilechansky, M.D., an OHSU hepatologist and KL2 scholar supported through CTSA funding, suggests that late-night eating may increase the risk of liver disease. In a study published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, researchers analyzed data from nearly 200,000 participants across three long-running national cohort studies and found that people who reported eating after dinner or bedtime had a 20% to 30% higher risk of developing metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease and cirrhosis compared with those who did not. The findings add to growing evidence that circadian rhythms play a critical role in metabolic health and suggest that meal timing may be a practical strategy to reduce liver disease risk. The work is also informing a new OHSU clinical trial evaluating whether eating earlier in the day can improve liver health outcomes.

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Patients’ Interests and Barriers to Research Partnerships Within an Academic Health System

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