Scott Lipkin: Coming Home to AAHRPP
When Scott Lipkin, DPM, CIP, joined the AAHRPP Board of Directors in January, it was a bit like coming home.
Years ago, while on the medical staff of Lehigh Valley Health Network, Scott served as an AAHRPP site visitor and member of AAHRPP’s Council on Accreditation. He took a step back in 2014 to avoid potential conflicts of interest (COI) after joining a management consulting firm where his responsibilities included consulting on accreditation.
Now that Scott is Corporate Vice President for Research at Baptist Health South Florida, COI is no longer a concern. So, when AAHRPP issued a call last year for new Board members, Scott seized the opportunity and applied.
“My passion has always been human subjects protection,” he says. Returning to AAHRPP, this time as a Board member, “is a way to give back to the community. My goal is to support and advance AAHRPP’s mission, demonstrate the value of accreditation, and help expand its footprint domestically and internationally.”
Scott’s connection to AAHRPP began when he was Chief of Podiatric Surgery, a clinical investigator, and a Chair of the Lehigh Valley IRB. At the health network’s request, he took the lead in helping Lehigh Valley attain initial AAHRPP accreditation in 2009. That accomplishment opened the door to his appointment as an AAHRPP site visitor and played a key role in his transition in 2010 to full-time research administration as Lehigh Valley’s Chief, Network Office of Research & Innovation.
As a site visitor, researcher, administrator, and consultant, Scott has seen, firsthand, how AAHRPP’s standards have helped strengthen both accredited organizations and the research enterprise as a whole. As an example, he cites policies on institutional COI, which “were relatively unheard of” before they were included in AAHRPP’s Elements. Now, such policies are “common” regardless of an organization’s accreditation status.
The same is true for research protections-related language that’s routinely required in agreements with clinical trial sponsors. “It used to be so difficult to get that language included in contracts,” Scott says. “Now sponsors expect it.”
The most significant change is the almost universal recognition that the responsibility for protecting research participants extends far beyond the IRB. “AAHRPP’s biggest success,” Scott says, “is that accreditation has memorialized the pivotal role of the HRPP in creating a culture and infrastructure that protect research participants.”
“Without that robust attention to participant safety, everything else is meaningless,” he says.