The role of the coordinating center in the obesity prevention at the worksite consortium.

This paper describes the role of the Coordinating Center for a seven-project consortium funded through a common request for applications. The seven studies are focusing on prevention and treatment of obesity at worksites. These projects are being conducted at different types of work sites that have diverse employee populations. The Center's functions include identifying opportunities for collaboration, encouraging communication among the project investigators, facilitating the adoption of common measures, combining data from two or more projects to achieve greater statistical power, and pooling data on measures such as physical activity, work productivity, health care use, and return on investment. To these ends, the Coordinating Center helped to develop a committee structure within the consortium, established a communications and data transmission web site, and arranged conference calls, committee meetings, and paper writing groups. The development and implementation of these functions are described in this paper.