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Background. Type 2 diabetes is a growing concern among medically underserved Chinese Americans. However, very few interventions have been developed or adapted for Chinese Americans with diabetes. Objective. To use a participatory research approach to evaluate the effectiveness of a culturally tailored, linguistically appropriate model for diabetes care employing health coaches to improve A1C levels among Chinese-American patients in a federally qualified health center setting. Methods. We compared change in A1C between intervention participants (n = 46), who received a health coaching intervention, and control participants (n = 46), who received usual care over a period of ~ 6 months. Results. Intervention participants showed a decrease in mean A1C at follow-up (−0.40%) compared to control subjects (+0.04%), although this difference was not statistically significant. At the 6-month follow-up, a significantly higher percentage of intervention participants (45.7%) had well-controlled A1C levels compared to control subjects (23.9%) (P = 0.048). Conclusions. It is feasible to implement a culturally tailored, linguistically appropriate teamlet model of care for Chinese Americans with type 2 diabetes. Such a model may be helpful in reducing A1C levels. Given trends in A1C improvement during a 6-month pilot, future randomized trials with a larger sample capable of providing adequate statistical power to detect improvements are warranted.

This article introduces the Community Health Applied Research Network (CHARN), a practice-based research network of community health centers (CHCs). Established by the Health Resources and Services Administration in 2010, CHARN is a network of 4 community research nodes, each with multiple affiliated CHCs and an academic center. The four nodes (18 individual CHCs and 4 academic partners in 9 states) are supported by a data coordinating center. Here we provide case studies detailing how CHARN is building research infrastructure and capacity in CHCs, with a particular focus on how community practice-academic partnerships were facilitated by the CHARN structure. The examples provided by the CHARN nodes include many of the building blocks of research capacity: communication capacity and “matchmaking” between providers and researchers; technology transfer; research methods tailored to community practice settings; and community institutional review board infrastructure to enable community oversight. We draw lessons learned from these case studies that we hope will serve as examples for other networks, with special relevance for community-based networks seeking to build research infrastructure in primary care settings.