While evaluation approaches for community-academic research groups are established, few tools exist for academic institutional advisory groups across multi-core centers and research, education, and clinical care missions. Institutional advisory group evaluation should consider group processes and their impact on community-centered outcomes. This study describes the community-engaged development of a mixed-method evaluation approach to address this gap and presents pilot outcomes across an NIH-funded center.

We utilized a Community of Practice model to co-develop a survey with 14 community and academic representatives of four advisory groups. The final survey included five categories of group process and four categories of outcomes. Storytelling sessions with community partners explored areas where the survey identified discrepancies in perspectives between community and academic team members, as well as areas with lower scores.

Nine community and 14 academic (staff and faculty) partners completed the survey. Respondents positively assessed group process outcomes (shared values, leadership, community-centeredness, and decision-making), and slightly less positive assessments of institutional outcomes. Storytelling sessions confirmed the overall satisfaction of community partners but highlighted actionable concerns within power-sharing, decision-making, funding equity, and trust-building.

The results of this equity-centered evaluation suggest the utility and importance of participatory, mixed-methods approaches to evaluating community-academic institutional advisory groups.

To compare healthcare survey response rates using two widely utilized recruitment methods: email and the electronic health record (EHR) patient portal.

Adults with a prior history of any bariatric surgery were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive a survey invitation via email or through the EHR patient portal. A second reminder was sent using the same method. A third invitation used a crossover approach, switching to the alternate method. We compared survey completion rates, changes in research preference status, and time to survey completion. Predictors of response were assessed using multivariable logistic regression.

The email group had a 9.9% response rate after the first invitation and 6.5% after the second. The EHR portal group had 8.4% and 4.5% response rates, respectively. Following crossover, the third invitation yielded a 4.4% response for those switched to the EHR portal and 7.5% for those switched to email. The EHR portal group was 27% less likely to complete the survey compared to the email group. Respondents were more likely to be female, non-Hispanic, White, have a recent healthcare encounter, and have recently logged into the portal. Median time to completion was under 24 hours in both groups, with over two-thirds of responses received on the day of or the day after the invitation. A change in research preference status was observed in 2.5% of email and 4.0% of portal participants.

Email-based recruitment yielded higher response rates than EHR portal-based recruitment, with most responses occurring shortly after invitation.