PaTH’s Protocol Review Committee

The PaTH Network Protocol Review Committee (PNPRC) streamlines the regulatory process and ensures PaTH-affiliated studies are patient-centered by working with Institutional Review Board (IRB) professionals and community representatives from each PaTH site.

PaTH governance policies require review and approval by the PNPRC before the formal submission of each protocol to the Johns Hopkins University IRB. This pre-review process not only addresses standard IRB concerns but also identifies the ways in which IRB norms and procedures differ across PaTH sites, ensures the community perspective from each site is represented, and explores solutions to the challenges these differences pose.

Patient perspectives from across the network also help guarantee that approaches are patient-centered. Likewise, clinician and IRB perspectives ensure clinical and ethical norms are maintained.

The unique opportunity to host conversations between senior IRB officials across institutions brings diverse perspectives and ideas together and facilitates the operationalization of innovative research methods.

PaTH’s partnering institutions have successfully entered into reliance agreements with Johns Hopkins University for PaTH IRB review and are able to cede review to a central source for observational studies and randomized controlled trials.