Get Involved

How to Join PROS

Why Should You (Your Practice) Join PROS?

Perhaps you have been wondering about some of the issues you face every day in your practice. Maybe you would like to be part of a group of practicing pediatricians that is attempting to understand the best ways to deliver child health care.

As a pediatrician, you possess expertise on how a primary care practice runs and know which research questions are important for pediatric practice. By linking you with experts in study design and research methodology, PROS capitalizes on your expertise and lets you participate in generating new knowledge about pediatric practice and child health.

What Are the Benefits of Joining?

Membership in PROS provides a number of benefits:

• Work with colleagues from around the U.S.

• Contribute meaningfully to improve pediatrics and child health

• Get preliminary reports of research results as soon as they are available

• Some PROS studies award CME or MOC credit to participants

• Opportunity to participate in manuscript development and/or review

• Have your practice acknowledged in published articles

• Receive CME credit for various studies and PROS meeting participation

Who Can Join?

Practices
Practices must provide a full range of direct Pediatric and/or adolescent patient primary care (including preventive services) to an active panel of patients. Each participating practice must include a current AAP member—but that member does not need to join PROS themselves.

Individuals
Physicians, nurse practitioners, or physician assistants who provide a full range of direct pediatric and/or adolescent patient primary care (including preventive services) in a PROS practice to an active panel of patients.

Ways to Participate

Participation time varies by project type:  

• PROS studies may involve completing brief data collection forms and conducting interventions with patients/families. 

• EHR studies may involve implementing the steps needed to share your EMR data so it can be combined with data from practices nationwide. 

How to Propose a Study

PROS is a real-world pediatric primary care laboratory. Studies approved for PROS are typically encounter-based projects that can capitalize on the national scale and diversity of the network.  PROS conducts practice-based observational and interventional studies with children, adolescents, families, and pediatricians.

To make a study suggestion, please contact a member of the PROS Executive Committee -- Steering Committee Chair, Dianna Abney, MD, FAAP (diannaabneymd@aol.com​), or PROS Director Alexander G. Fiks, MD, MSCE, FAAP (FIKS@email.chop.edu). Ultimately, you will be asked to submit a written proposal for consideration by the PROS Steering Committee.

Proposals will need to specify the:

1. Research question
2. Specific aims of the study
3. Information to be gained from the study and its importance
4. Data to be collected
5. Approximate time frame for accomplishing the study

Proposal Review

Step 1: Criteria applied by the PROS Steering Committee in its deliberation include:

• Importance of the study idea
• Appropriateness for PROS
• Feasibility

Step 2: If the Steering Committee approves a study idea, it is brought before the Chapter Coordinators for review.  In addition to the criteria listed above:

• Coordinators have the opportunity to recommend protocols changes
• Review and comment on study materials
• Advise the investigators on ways to maximize the study's "do-ability" in practice settings

Through this process, network members gain ownership of the study (and improve it!).

Timeframe

The process from suggestion of an idea to launching a study may take 2-4 years, with funding as the limiting factor.

Ready to join? Have questions?  

Please Contact PROS for answers your questions and help you get started.

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