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When the University of Michigan (UM) joined the ranks of the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA1) consortium in 2007, the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR) was established to support the translation of medical advances throughout our institution. The importance of clinical research was recognized immediately and the clinical research unit (CRU), first established in 1977, was embraced as the newly named MICHR Clinical Research Unit (MCRU) to form the hub of our clinical translation infrastructure. Concomitant with this move, MCRU reevaluated its business model and realized that it no longer matched closely with the rapidly evolving research portfolio, which was increasingly driven by epigenetics, epigenomics and other population based research. In response, MCRU established a new mobile clinical research team, named MCRU 2U, as a way to transfer the research skills and expertise of our clinical research staff to the chair or bedside of our research participants. The guiding metric embraced as an indicator of the MCRU 2U ‘value-add’ was the enablement of research that would be difficult or impossible to carry out in its absence. This paper outlines the steps taken in pursuit of this metric and the measure of its success, highlighting the impacts, benefits and the lessons learned from 5 years of mobile clinical research at the University of Michigan.