Leveraging interprofessional collaboration to collect agreed common outcomes in everyday clinical practice

Recent experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic have reraised long-standing questions in the research of Acupuncture and East Asian Medicine (AEAM). In particular, how do we conceptualize, collect, and share data on acupuncture that are useful for building an evidence base in the modern era, without abandoning all relevance to the medical systems that drive clinical practice? COVID-19 showed us that the international collaborative data sharing protocols for the development of vaccines and treatment methods needed for a global response to the pandemic were entirely feasible, although previously unimagined. Similarly in the acupuncture world, practitioners engaged with clinical and basic research at previously unheard-of levels, as their work was informed by information regarding COVID-19 mechanisms as well as clinical practices in China. As practitioners/researchers of AEAM we ask, how can we best capitalize on this new level of engagement, so as to promote organized and systematic data sharing between practitioners and researchers?