A look back at PCORI's 2012 achievements

December 27, 2012

The holiday season is traditionally a time to look back at the year's achievements. So, as we approach the end of 2012, let me remind you of a few of PCORI's accomplishments and invite you to read more about them.    This has been a year of substantial progress for PCORI. We finalized our definition of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) and our National Priorities and Research Agenda, and adopted methodological standards for PCOR, all after soliciting and incorporating public comment. We made major strides in engaging a broad range of healthcare community stakeholders in our work. And we approved 75 research awards, 50 earlier this year through our Pilot Projects Program and 25 more on December 18 in our first round of primary research funding.    You can find out more about all of these efforts on our web site. But let me point you to a few recent PCORI Blog posts on developments you might find of particular interest.

Our First Set of Patient-Centered Comparative Effectiveness Awards In my most recent blog post, Round One: PCORI Gets Into the Business of Funding Patient-Centered CER, I outline how pleased we were with our first set of awards resulting from the PCORI Funding Announcements (PFAs) we released in May. I discuss the approach our selection committee used in picking the 25 projects, in 17 states, to which we've committed nearly $41 million in funding. And I tried to give you a sense of what we learned from this effort and how we might do a better job with our application guidelines and review process in the future.    Engaging the Stakeholder Community in Research Prioritization Earlier this month we hosted two back-to-back workshops in the ongoing effort to engage the healthcare community in our process for selecting and prioritizing the topics we hope to see researchers study.     The first of our most recent workshops, "What Should PCORI Study? A Call for Topics from Patients and Stakeholders," literally invited stakeholders to suggest topics we should fold into our funding process. Susan Hildebrandt, our Director of Stakeholder engagement, provides a closer look at the results of that workshop in her blog post, Harnessing the Expertise of the Healthcare Community to Guide Outcomes Research.    The second workshop, "PCORI Methodology Workshop for Prioritizing Specific Research Topics," brought together expert methodologists, researchers, patients and other stakeholders to help us refine our process for identifying the questions important to patients, caregivers and clinicians so they can be the subject of future funding calls. Senior Scientist Rachael Fleurence, PhD, shares more about this initiative in her post Workshop Advances PCORI's Process for Picking High-Priority Research Questions.   Engaging Patients in Building a Research Community Bringing patients into our work in a meaningful way has been a particular emphasis for us this year. In Maintaining Momentum, Implementing Patient Input, Sue Sheridan, our Director of Patient Engagement, provides a follow-up report on the Patient Engagement Workshop we held in October, sharing plans for implementing some of the suggestions that came out of the event. We're also very excited about the launch of our first challenge initiative, which seeks out innovators who will create a "matching system" to link patients and scientists as partners in conducting research.  In Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Sheridan and PCORI Deputy Executive Director Anne Beal, MD, MPH, provide background and details of this competition, another suggestion discussed at the Patient Engagement Workshop.

We look forward to continuing our work together to advance our program of "research done differently" as we seek to provide patients and those who care for them with information that will help them make better-informed health and health care decisions. We have big plans for doing that in 2013; I'll be reporting to you on some of those initiatives in early January.   Until then, best wishes for the New Year.     Joe Selby, MD, MPH Executive Director Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute