The Importance of Intentionality in Community Partnerships

At Northwestern, we have multiple ways of facilitating community partnerships. We can convene what we call sharps panels, which is patients with the disease or with experience with the disease that can act as advisors to an investigator. There's very little research in lupus that's happening at the hospitals that are affiliated with the HBCU medical schools,. So, you know, we need to start thinking about how we change this paradigm and how we become more intentional about addressing these issues systematically.