Illustrating and analyzing the processes of multi-institutional collaboration: Lessons learnt at Howard University Hospital.

Multi-institutional collaboration offers a promising approach to the dissemination of resources for capacity building and the improvement of the training of new investigators and residents, especially in areas of novel curricular content. Physicians should keep pace with the rapid growth of curricular content in an era of restricted resources. Such collaborations, in which educational entities work together and share resources and infrastructure, have been employed in health care to improve quality of care, capacity building, disparity reduction, and resident training. This paper examines a federally funded multi-institutional collaboration for the project STRIDE (Seek, Treat, Reach to Identify Pretrial Defendants Enhancement) between Yale University, George Mason University (GMU), and Howard University, a Historically Black University. The STRIDE study collaboration focused on mental health, opioid addiction, and infectious disease/HIV among Africans Americans involved in CJS (Criminal Justice System). We discuss some of the challenges and benefits of collaborative research projects conducted at Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCUs) and highlight the educational opportunities created by such collaborations for residents and other trainees, leading to the development of independent investigators through multi-institutional, structured collaborative research. We identify some unique challenges such as substance use, race, stigma, incarceration among participants, and the cultural and power difference between participating institutions, and thereby address these issues and how it impacted the course of the multi-institutional collaborative effort.