Dear RADx-UP partners,



A quick repeat of our appreciation to the project teams that presented at the third annual RADx-UP Scientific Meeting last month. View a short recap video, and find all the session and presentation recordings on this page.

As Eliseo Pérez-Stable noted in his closing remarks, the RADx-UP initiative to combat health disparities reflects your strong commitment to community partnership and engagement. Your work, alongside the rest of the consortium, is adding up to save lives now and in the future. Please help us keep telling your projects’ stories.

Next month, there is another opportunity to reflect on how this program is making a difference. The CDCC will present an update to the NIH RADx Executive Committee to share the progress of this consortium. We'll spotlight examples of the impact that your teams have had — impact on your communities, on your research teams, on the research process itself, and, most importantly, on the underserved populations you sought to engage.

We want to thank you in advance for responding to the EITs, Tracking & Evaluation Team, and others to help us understand the many ways in which your RADx-UP activities have made a difference.

Changes to myRADx-UPhome and RADx-UP.org links

Several pages that previously lived on myRADx-UPhome have navigated to RADx-UP.org. See the list below for updated links. Please reach out to the CDCC if you have trouble finding a specific page that isn’t listed.

• About the Tracking & Evaluation team
• About Community Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH)
• Project-wide Meeting recordings
• RADx-UP data trainings
• Communications toolkit
• Newsletter archive
• Partnering for Impact Workshop Series recordings can be found individually in the Resource Library

Collaboration is key to ensuring RADx-UP data and learnings have the greatest impact. Learn about current analysis proposals and their writing teams at the Partnering for Impact homepage. Also submit your own concept ideas there; see existing concepts.

New Sexual & Gender Minority Working Group

Your CDCC has added a new RADx-UP Working Group. The Sexual & Gender Minority (SGM) Working Group brings together a community of practice, which is available to those internal and external to RADx-UP. The group emphasizes the impact and importance of SGMs in underserved communities with respect to increasing access to COVID-19 testing. This Working Group seeks to foster collaboration and share resources to support shared knowledge and networking among members through a LinkedIn group. Join on LinkedIn.

Language matters when describing community-generated research materials

The RADx-UP Engagement Resource Center would like to share the new document "Redefining Scholarship." The language and definitions outlined in the document are intended to help accurately define all kinds of scholarship as valuable to elevate community-developed and community-validated research products.

Read more about how language matters and how you can support this effort.

Community Health Worker insights video

This RADx-UP video was shared at the Community Health Worker Symposium last month. It includes several Community Health Workers (CHWs) from around the country describing how CHWs benefit communities and what supports them and gives them satisfaction as a CHW. Listen to the CHW insights.

RADx-UP linkage datasets

RADx-UP project teams and grant recipients use common data elements (CDEs) to set a standard for study questions and provide a way to aggregate data from across projects. The CDCC harmonizes the CDEs and makes Core Analytic Datasets for cross-consortium analyses. This updated document can be downloaded and provides more information on datasets and how they can be used. Read.

Opportunities to Enhance Health Equity by Integrating Community Health Workers into Payment and Care Delivery Reforms

Evidence from a review of the initial publications generated by RADx-UP demonstrates that community-based care delivery models that prioritize CHWs in a health care workforce can help respond to public health crises. They can also be incorporated sustainably into existing infrastructure to support the design and implementation of equitable health policy and practice. This paper includes policy recommendations on using CHW models. Read the full paper.

A brief synopsis of the paper is also available in English and Spanish.

Animal travel during COVID-19 lockdowns

Here’s an interesting outcome of the pandemic: A recent study found that, during COVID-19 travel restrictions in 2020, wild mammals traveled 73% further than they had in the previous year. They also roamed 36% closer to roads. The lockdowns offered scientists a unique opportunity to learn more about the impacts of human infrastructure on animal life. They tracked over 2,000 mammals from 43 species around the world. Read more about their findings and the ways human behavior affects the lives of animals.