**Background:** Health services research benefits from frontline clinician input across all research stages, yet clinician perspectives are often not meaningfully engaged. This quality improvement study within one VA Healthcare System aimed to determine barriers, facilitators, and solutions to optimal clinician engagement in the research enterprise. The goal was to gauge frontline clinicians' interest in research involvement and identify ways researchers can partner with clinicians in mutually beneficial and sustainable ways.
**Methods:** The study used convenience sampling and semi-structured interviews with 21 multidisciplinary clinicians from the Durham VA Health Care System. Inclusion criteria required full-time clinical staff employment and fewer than 5 peer-reviewed publications with no first or senior author publications. The research team created a semi-structured interview guide using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, focusing on barriers and facilitators to research engagement. Interviews were conducted virtually with one interviewer and one note-taker; audio recording was not approved under the quality improvement framework. Detailed notes were shared with interviewees for participant checking. Two coders analyzed data using descriptive content analysis with an inductive approach, using NVivo 12 Pro. Coding disagreements were resolved through meetings with the larger research team. The team shared initial findings with interview participants, researchers, and health system leaders in listening sessions to contextualize findings.
**Key Results:** The sample comprised 21 participants (16% response rate from 131 approached). Participants were 66% female, 71% White, with a mean of 11.8 years at the VA and 3.2 clinic days per week. Two major themes emerged. Theme 1, "Perceptions of Research," included three subthemes: (a) prior research experience—nearly all had favorable views of research, but only three noted exposure to research methods during clinical training; (b) desired degree of engagement—participants endorsed supportive, informant, involved, and collaborator roles widely, while only two (both social workers) chose leader; (c) benefits to clinicians—professional development, learning new skills, improving patient care, preventing burnout through task diversity. Theme 2, "Characterizing Effective Engagement," included: (a) engagement barriers—lack of awareness of ongoing research, lack of formal research training, no protected time or compensation for research, competing clinical priorities; (b) engagement facilitators—regular contact with researchers, workflow integration, clinical liaisons, leadership buy-in; (c) impact of clinician's racial identity—most participants did not indicate race/ethnicity played a role, though some hypothesized that diverse perspectives could enhance recruitment and cultural insights. Proposed solutions included offering "How to get involved in research" sessions at staff meetings, conducting annual surveys of clinician research needs, restructuring return-of-results forums, encouraging research participation in QI efforts, establishing a Research Review Committee with clinician membership, and tailoring approaches to individual disciplines.
**Clinical Implications:** Investing in frontline clinicians as research collaborators benefits clinicians, health systems, and patients. However, meaningful engagement requires system-level prioritization, including protected time, compensation, regular researcher-clinician contact, and integration of research into clinical workflow. The VA and other large integrated healthcare systems could align incentives by building research participation into annual performance evaluations and creating funding that motivates researcher-clinician collaboration. The study is limited by its single-site VA setting (salaried clinicians), low response rate (16%), lack of racial/ethnic diversity, and the quality improvement framework that precluded audio recording. Despite these limitations, the multidisciplinary sample and rigorous qualitative methods provide actionable insights for engaging frontline clinicians in learning health systems.