Global Research and Collaboration Center

EIM Global Research and Collaboration Center

Welcome to the EIMGRCC!

Concept and Rationale: Physical inactivity is a leading cause of poor health, mortality and higher health care costs in the US and throughout the world. However, too few health systems and health care providers routinely include physical activity (PA) as part of the prevention and management of chronic diseases.

For 5 years, the Exercise is Medicine^® (EIM) initiative of the American College of Sports Medicine has helped build local networks to support the systematic integration of PA as a vital sign and a routine component of health care system’s implementation of population health management and the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases in the US and globally via the EIM Solution.

Large-scale implementation of the EIM Solution across different populations, settings and health care systems is a complex process. Accordingly EIM, in collaboration with Emory University Rollins School of Public Health has established the EIM-GRCC, the academic hub in charge of leading the evaluation of the EIM initiative in collaboration with partnering health care systems, community organizations, fitness and technology companies.

Led by EIM advisory board member, Dr. Felipe Lobelo, and housed within the Global Diabetes Research Center at Emory’s Hubert Department of Global Health, the EIMGRCC leverages the expertise of leading researchers at Emory University and the global network of ACSM/EIM members to achieve its overall goal of evaluating the real-life effectiveness of EIM implementation via standardized clinical-community linkages to prevent, manage and reverse the progression of chronic diseases.

EIM-GRCC Core Objectives:

Initiate and collaborate on research projects to advance the successful implementation and scale-up of EIM in the U.S. and globally, using implementation science, integrating objective PA assessments, patient-centered pragmatic trials, health IT applications, economic analyses, comparative effectiveness, policy, surveillance and health services tools.
Serve as a coordinating center for multi-center EIM implementation projects and offer state-of-the-art consultation and evaluation support to health systems and community care networks including the development and validation of effectiveness metrics, behavior change standards, monitoring frameworks and data collection, aggregation and interpretation needs, to objectively assess the EIM solution level of reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation and maintenance, under a population health management framework.
Collaborate on the development and implementation of a sustainable model to educate the workforce necessary to implement EIM in the US and globally, including a training and certification curriculum for primary care providers and fitness professionals, on the basic concepts of PA and health and how to implement EIM in clinical-community settings.